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David Swing's 


Works. 




i. 

motives of life, 


Price $1.00. 


II. 
CLUB ESSAYS, 


Price $1.00. 


III. 
TRUTHS FOR TO-DAY, 

1st Series, 


Price $1.50. 


IV. 
TRUTHS FOR TO-DAY, 

2nd Series 


, Price $1.50. 


V. 
SERMONS, 


Price $1.50. 



SERMONS 











CHICAGO: 

JANS EN, McCLURG & CO., 
1884. 



"BV4-25 2> 



COPYRIGHTED 

BY JANSEN, McCLURG & CO., 

A D. 1S83. 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON I. 

A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

PAGE. 

Ps. 3 : 10. — The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. 9 

SERMON II. 

A TEMPORARY CREED. 
Jeremiah xxxv : 7. — All your days ye shall dwell in tents. . 24 

SERMON III. 

MORAL ESTHETICS. 

Isatah lii : 7* — How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet 
of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that 
bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that 
saith unto Zion, " Thy God reigneth." * , . . 38 

SERMON IV. 

CIVILIZATION. 

EcCLESIASTES ill : 21, — Who knoweth the spirit of man that go- 
eth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward 
toward the earth ? ■ . 52 

(5) 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON V. 

AN INWROUGHT LIFE. 

PAGE. 

Num. viii : 4. — And this work of the candlestick was of beaten 
gold unto the shaft thereof; unto the flowers thereof was 
beaten work. • 67 

SERMON VI. 

A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

Eph. iv : 16. — From whom the whole body fitly joined together 
and compacted 8 1 

SERMON VII. 

A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

Genesis xiii : 8. — And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no 
strife I pray thee between me and thee, and between my herds- 
men and thy herdsmen, for we be brethren. Is not the whole 
land before thee ? Separate thyself I pray thee from me ; if 
thou wilt take the left hand then I will go to the right, or if 
thou depart to the right hand then I will go to the left. 

I John iii : 16. — And we ought to lay down our lives for 
the brethren 96 

SERMON VIII. 

THE BETTER CHOICE. 
Gen. ii : 9, 16, 17. — The tree of knowledge of good and of 
evil 113 

SERMON IX. 

EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 
Luke ii : 40. — -And the child grew and became strong in Spirit, 
filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. .128 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON X. 

FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 

PAGE. 

Rev. ii : 10. — Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee 
a crown of life • 146 

SERMON XL 

THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 
John x ; 11. — The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep, 160 

SERMON XII. 

EQUALITY IN YARIETY. 

Ecclesiastes iii : 11. — He hath made everything beautiful in 
its time. . 174 

SERMON XIII. 

REASON AND IMAGINATION. 
Rev. xxi: I.- — And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. . 189 

SERMON XIV. 

THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

Gen. i : 1. — In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth 203 

SERMON XV. 

MERIT. 

Rom. viii : 31. — If God be for us, who can be against us ? 

Rev. xiv : 13. — Their works do follow them 217 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON XVI. 

THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

PAGE. 

Ezra vii : 27. — Blessed be the Lord God of our fathers who 
hath put in the king's heart such a thing as this to beautify the 
house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. . • . . 232 

SERMON XVII. 

A GREAT GOD. 
Psalms xcv : 3. — For the Lord is a great God 247 

SERMON XVIII. 

THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 
Matt v: 5. — Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth. • 263 

SERMON XIX. 

SPIRITUALITY. 
Rom. viii : 6. — To be spiritually minded is life. • . . 277 

SERMON XX. 

THE HIGHER LIFE. 
Luke i: 32. — He shall be great and shall be called the Son of 
the Highest. 293 



/ 



SERMONS 



i. 

A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 



The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. — Ps., 3:10. 

Said an ancient, " Happy is he who is able to know 
the causes of things." The happiness comes not from 
the mere gratification of a curiosity, but because when 
the mind has found a good reason of things it has 
suddenly come upon a harmony and a pleasure of a 
high quality. To know the causes of things helps 
society prevent or cure many of its troubles and to 
cause and redouble its pleasures. When one thinks 
of the inexplicable diseases which at times assume a 
devastating form and sweep away tens of thousands 
whose homes may be among the pure hills of the 
country, one becomes perplexed and unhappy and is 
ready to upbraid science as being only the chattering 
of children; but when along any path of human life 

(9) 



IO A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

there is revealed a great cause of public welfare or of 
misfortune, a cause whose power can be increased or 
diminished, then is the mind full of delight. Not to 
know the reason of things is to live where musicians 
are always tuning their instruments, but where they 
never play a tune. All is discordant fragments of 
sound. Each sound would be beautiful if it could 
come in its proper relation to other tones. Thus the 
isolated events of our world distract rather than de- 
light, but when they are all fastened together by an 
adequate causation it is as though many instruments 
had risen above the tuning experiment and were now 
sounding in the harmony of some great composition. 
It is the business of philosophy to discover the rela- 
tions of facts, and to combine into sweet music the 
endless multitude of detached sounds. That is the 
greatest theory which will gather upon one thread 
the most and the richest pearls. The happiness of 
that soul would be great who should discover a cor- 
relation perfect and simple of all the varied moral 
scenery of our earth! What an achievement could 
some one take disease and sin and death and loss and 
gain and beauty and deformity and power and weak- 
ness and tears and laughter, and make them all the 
parts of some picture which would be less great if 
any of these elements had been wanting! Such a 
victory over earth's discord will never be won by 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. II 

man, because man is too small to hope ever to find a 
measurement of the universe. This impossibility 
does not, however, change his duty or taste. He 
must find the largest harmonies possible to his facul- 
ties. And happiest will be the man or the age which 
shall find the largest and best theory of human exist- 
ence. 

The more you compare with each other what dog- 
mas exist regarding man's coming and staying and 
going, the more will you sympathize with the psalmist 
who declared that the fear or assumption of a Jehovah 
was the principal element of wisdom. In the original 
language of our text the Hebrew writer used that 
word which might be written but not spoken — ren- 
dered into our tongue by the term Jehovah; but by 
the Jews of to-day by the term, The Eternal. The 
belief in the Essential Life — the One who was and is 
and shall be, is the chief element of all wisdom. Man 
has long been out in the wide world seeking the 
lost reason of things. He has sought by all the sea- 
shores where the tides come and sink back; he has 
carried on his search in the fields and woods where 
tree and leaf and fruit delight and amaze; he has con- 
tinued his studies at night under the silent stars ; he 
has been still more deeply thoughtful among the 
multitudes of men as they have triumphed or suffered, 
and at last he should come in from his long wander- 



12 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

ing and should declare that no system will for a mo- 
ment compare with the Divine Philosophy. 

That you may feel the value of this assumption of 
a God, you must first consent to the proposition that 
no theory can be found that will be all through and 
through an explanation of man. The happiness of 
knowing the final reason of the universe to the utter- 
most is denied the heart. If we cast ourselves upon 
the major premise that all that exists must have a 
cause, we are at once asked to say who made God ? 
for he at once asks of us a cause. It must be as- 
sumed in the outset that no perfect solution of the 
problem will ever be found by the children of men. 
Bright, noble being indeed is man ! but he falls far 
short of the ability to grasp his world, and hence great 
gulfs are located called "eternity" and "infinity," places 
where the mind wearies and faints. But it must also 
be remembered that atheism and material science 
are in this same valley of humiliation, and in attempt- 
ing to escape the divine philosophy they fall into 
parallel intellectual troubles. Coming upon man from 
any compass-point, his situation is inexplicable. All 
must wait for another life to come with higher powers 
and with more data before they shall declare that 
they have learned to the full the lesson of human ex- 
istence. If you are in doubt in regard to the divine 
theory, do not for a moment imagine that there re- 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. I 3 

mains for you some better basis of belief. Other 
theories do not heal doubts, they simply trample them 
under foot. As Indians do not dry up tears by re- 
moving the troubles that bring them, but by laughing 
at the powers of grief, so there are forms of philosophy 
which dispel doubts, not by bringing a solution, but 
by laughing at the soul that desires to have them 
solved. There are two kinds of peace for the heart : 
that which comes from having its troubles lifted, and 
that other which comes from an indifference of feel- 
ing. To fly from the perplexities of a divine system 
to find peace away from it is not to draw any nearer 
to the causes of things, but it is to take an opiate that 
insensibility may come to occupy the place which in 
religion is full of longings and hope. A material 
theory diminishes the chances of disappointment by 
dismissing from the heart all spirit of expectation. 
It does not solve riddles, but defies them. 

The divine philosophy makes the existence of a 
Supreme Being its starting point. All systems are 
compelled to start with an assumption. Materialism 
assumes that matter never began. It was from all 
eternity. It assumes also that this matter contained 
something that would result in the phenomena of a 
space full of stars and globes full of such details as 
earth possesses. Atheism thus starts upon an as- 
sumption and a priori contains not one trace of reason 



14 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY, 

not possessed by those who assume the existence of 
a God. Setting forth from the same kind of premise, 
assumed premise, these theories very soon diverge, 
and the greatness of the realms of mind and heart 
settle upon the former system. God as a starting- 
point is superior to the cold assumption of the eternity 
of matter. Man being at liberty to select either or- 
igin of the cosmos, he would better assume the eternal 
mind. Apart from all questions of duty or piety, the 
inquirer, seeking a rest for the lever that is to lift up 
the universe, would better find that fulcrum in in- 
telligence than in atoms of material, because the 
historic career of mind discloses its ability to arrange 
matter into shapes of utility and beauty. Mind is 
seen in the character of a contriver and fabricator and 
creator. It can discover a great end and then the 
way of reaching it, and it can love the end and the 
way. But the eternal particles of matter contain no 
care about ends and aims. The mountains do not 
project the idea of a sunlight or moonlight. Matter, 
whether diffused as star-dust or gathered up into suns 
and planets, has no desire to see buds in the woods 
or fish in the waters, or such a sublime scene as the 
family of man. The less mental anything is, the less 
active is it in making a variety out of unity. The 
oyster is one of the lowest forms of life, and compared 
with the oriole describes a small circle of action. The 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 1 5 

oriole will construct an ingenious nest ; it will reveal 
wisdom ; it will reveal affection ; it will chirp, and it 
makes use of some kind of language. Thus as mind 
rises in quality it widens in the power to invent and 
combine and arrange and fabricate, and when we 
come to man the surface of the earth is marked all 
over by the action of intellect upon matter. The 
unity of dust is changed into variety. As when one 
looks upon the illuminated page of some old missal 
his eye surveys with delight thousands of lines run- 
ning in all ways with their bright colors, now meet- 
ing in an arch, now bending into a circle, now crossing 
in diamond angles, now in the peaceful right angle, 
now moving away in parallels, now dropping like 
festoons of vines, now forming a cross, now a crown, 
all brilliant, all full of harmony; and the admirer 
passes to wonder in what grave sleeps the hand which 
thus broke up the unity of a white parchment into 
such a delightful variety; so gazing upon the surface 
of the earth we see it all made like a missal page by 
the mind of its strange occupants, and the conclusion 
comes resistlessly that the matter of the universe 
burst forth into its variety at the bidding of a mind. 
Some Soul living or now dead has sat down by the 
blank leaf of nature and has illumined the page. 

Thus the assumption of mind aids best to explain 
the progress of insensate dust toward an infinite va- 



1 6 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

riety. But we are not called upon to explain a simple 
variety, for although that would be argument enough 
in favor of a mental origin of the universe thaft match- 
less quantity of combination is not so wonderful as 
the quality of these details of life and action. The 
quality of this variety is something which matter will 
not explain. Man contains a wonderful assemblage 
of attributes : taste, reason, love, wit, faith, hope, the 
moral sense. These subdivide in the valleys of 
human life like that river which separated into four 
channels as it moved through the garden of Eden, 
and with one current washed the gold and onyx stone 
of Havilah, and with another the summer land of 
Ethiopia, and with another the man-growing vale 
of the Euphrates; only these springs flowing from 
the soul form into a hundred great streams and make 
arts and industries and thoughts and languages and 
cities and towns and homes on their banks as they 
flow. It is not a variety we behold, but a sublime 
variety. And as the tendency of dust is to unity and 
rest, a divine philosophy must come to us to explain 
the impressive scene. It is the most adequate cause. 
Unity passes into variety only at the bidding of mind. 
Having found what theory can best explain the 
origin of man we must still seek for a theory which 
will best care for man after he has come. To origi- 
nate man was no more of a task than to care for him 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY, iy 

afterward. A creature having many passions and 
interests and fears and hopes, and possessing enor- 
mous powers does not contain all of his problems in 
the question of his coming, but he unveils new prob- 
lems in the question of his stay. What will govern 
man after he has been created ? He must remain 
here seventy years. Millions in number and full of 
passions these beings must possess rules and motives 
of conduct. As out of a divine mind can come the 
phenomena of life, animal and vegetable, so from such 
an infinite thinking power can issue the motives and 
laws of being. The divine theory appearing to ac- 
count for the coming of man, comes again to regulate 
him while he is here. It surpasses other theories in 
almost every detail of law and motive. Its superi- 
ority lies partly in this, that man can not be perfectly 
made or governed unless he is taught that he is on 
the way to another and longer life. If man came 
from only dust and will soon go back to nothing, 
the worth of morals must sink down to the level of 
such a mean origin and mean destiny; but if man 
came from the Supreme and is on his way to a final 
judgment or reward, every law of action rises in sig- 
nificance. If human life is ruled by motives, the 
grander the motives the greater and better the gov- 
ernment. The soul coming from a God and march- 
ing toward God and all the while in the presence of 
2 



1 8 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY, 

God is a priori in a better path than the soul which 
springing from the dust and attended by laws elabo- 
rated from relations of dust is to pass back in a few 
years to simply other dust. This difference of motive 
needs only to be mentioned. Man having been 
brought into the world by a divine philosophy is best 
cared for by that system. 

Having ordered this amazing variety to spring up 
from material insensibility, the divine system can best 
care for the immense products of creative power and 
can best harmonize these details in a far-off destiny. 
An irreligious causation leaves the young dead all 
uncared for; and when you remember how large a 
proportion of mankind dies in childhood you will 
conclude the theory of man hard and imperfect 
which has no tear for the death-bed of the little chil- 
dren and for those in the morning of life, but the 
theory of a God makes the grave a part of the gen- 
eral progress and weaves sorrow and tears and in- 
fancy and mature years and age into one perfect 
drama, and that a drama of happiness. It will em- 
brace the most varied events and conditions, will ap- 
ply to all races and all times, and will everywhere 
repeat the words that the troubles of these transient 
years are working out an exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory. It abandons nothing. It never sur- 
renders nor dies. Meeting with great difficulties in 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. I 9 

this world it appeals to the great coming eternity and 
goes on bearing with it all its problems. As our 
globe itself smitten here and there by storms and 
frozen by winter and shaken by earthquakes which 
have displaced oceans and continents has whirled 
onward around the sun and has turned silently upon 
its axis and has come again and again to its summer- 
time and seasons of inexpressible peace, so the theory 
of God has surrendered nothing of man and his 
greatness, but has passed through many clouds and 
is pressing over the grave with man still resting upon 
its bosom. 

In making an estimate of a scheme for this world 
we demand a method not only which will account for 
man's coming to the earth, and which shall furnish him 
with life-motives while he is here, motives taken 
greatly from another life, but we must seek a funda- 
mental thought that will take care of an earth greater 
than the one we see, of a race greater than the one 
now living in the two hemispheres. Great as 
the modern nations and modern times are, they are 
still the infant days of the human race. It has 
been only about three hundred years since the human 
family began truly to advance in intellectual power, 
and from the achievements of such a brief period we 
must infer a future great beyond all parallel. Popu- 
lation is to double itself and then still go rapidly on- 



20 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

ward. Science will drain marshes and water deserts 
and counteract climate until even the tropics shall 
rival the temperate zones as the homes of happy 
millions. Some of the European nations are now in 
such yearly peril as to food that they are willing 
some of their millions should migrate beyond seas. 
The mysterious wrapping of human life is being 
wound around the world, slowly but really and grace- 
fully. Mexico and South America are to receive 
their hundreds of millions and while this almost 
numberless host is swarming into old and new nations, 
the inventions and discoveries will become more and 
more amazing and compared with such a coming 
world the history of our day will read like a great 
man's journal of his childhood. The increase of in- 
tellectual power and the presence everywhere of 
liberty will take this mighty multitude far away from 
the docility of the Asiatics and of the Africans, and 
will confer upon the coming mind the stormy quali- 
ties of awakened passion, for education confers unrest 
rather than peace. 

Against such a day of greatly increased desires 
and demands what philosophy is adequate except the 
sublime theory of a God ? Scientific and atheistic 
theories are daily revealing their inadequacy, for in 
the presence of all our school-houses and railways 
and telegraphs and countless marvels crime is as 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 21 

composed and confident as it was when the mail was 
carried on horseback and when our parlors were 
lighted with candles. Nor do these crimes spring 
out of the wrongs of the common people, for did they 
they would pass away under the flag of freedom. 
The philosophy of the future would then be "Liberty ;" 
but unfortunately for such a hope murder is as com- 
mon in America as in Ireland and our parks are little 
more safe for a kind and noble man than an Irish park 
is safe for an exacting landlord, iso man's life is 
secure under any flag or school-house-shadow or be- 
side any group of inventions, and simply because 
there are murderers swarming forth from the years 
that have no God. There are hundreds of men in 
this city who would crush in a skull for the hope of 
finding two dollars in the possession of the murdered 
citizen — they would do this simply because they have 
not risen to any height whatever of a moral nature. 
In this land there is no motive for crime except the 
baseness of the criminal. All is explained by the 
word depravity. 

France grew sick of its godlessness, and was glad 
to hear from the lips of Victor Cousin and Chateau- 
briand the inspirational eloquence of a new spiritual- 
ity. This clear stream began to flow soon after France 
had descended into the depths of atheism and its 
volume was swelled by the romantic religiousness of 



22 A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 

Lamartine and by the formal and deep argumentation 
of Guizot. Other gracious showers fell upon a land 
that was rapidly becoming a desert, and that France 
is not now a ruin comes chiefly from the fact that a 
divine philosophy rushed in between her sinking 
form and tne grave. Of this salvation Victor Cousin 
was the prime leader. For fifty years, when France 
most needed guidance, the ideas of this one man 
formed an impulse and basis of French thought. The 
young men had by thousands listened to this new ar- 
gument which had all the power of thunder and all 
the sweetness of a song. And now if France is again 
sinking into mere fashion and vice it is because the 
new science comes into its schools and streets empty 
of human accountability and human hopes. It would 
be impossible here to tell what were the salient points 
taken by Victor Cousin along with Royer Collard 
but all these subdivisions of his system set forth from 
the single word, God ! Upon that deep foundation 
arose his structure into which was carried all the 
grandeur of earth. Coming like a triumphant but 
spiritual Caesar this conqueror brought in grand pro- 
cession the arts and morals and all the opulence of 
the soul, and placed them in the temple of Him whom 
the Jews called, " Was, and is, and is to be." Victor 
Cousin pointed out a gate- way vast enough to admit 
the human race when it came, and grand enough to 



A DIVINE PHILOSOPHY. 



23 



offer it an exit when it must die. Our age has had 
already a taste of the Godless form of logic and 
morals; and as men at sea at night tell by the chilling 
air that mountains of floating ice are near, so already 
in the depravity of the day we may feel the icy breath 
of a society which has no divine origin and no divine 
destiny. If any of you in these times of inquiry 
would find a theory that will prove adequate to the 
wants of man, that will explain the most facts, that 
will most inspire and most exalt, that will meet the 
great future of earth, that will neglect no one, the 
dying child or the dying father or mother, such a 
theory will roll like a pure river out of the single 
word — God. 



II. 

A TEMPORARY CREED. 



All your days ye shall dwell in tents. — Jeremiah, xxxv: 7. 

Emigrants to a new world, even when they are of 
a noble and rich order, must, when entering an un- 
settled country, construct the house of a day and the 
barn and fence of the present. They cannot afford 
the time nor can they command the material that 
would be demanded in the building of permanent 
structures. The most useful labor must be performed 
first. Trees must be felled or the wild ground must 
be plowed and planting must be done and some kind 
of shelter constructed against rain and cold. By 
slow degrees must come the ideal house and the 
ideal furniture. Thus railway men in their work of 
construction lay down first an imperfect track upon 
which they may transport material for the more en- 
during bridges and arches and stations. Each year 
brings more time and more material and more wealth 
and the temporary is gradually displaced by the en- 
during. Even Nature asks the privilege of doing 

(24) 



A TEMPORARY CREED. 2$ 

some hasty work in the outset and of making im- 
provements at her leisure. Her first animals were 
neither intelligent nor handsome — great ugly beasts 
and birds and fishes valuable only as first lessons in 
the great school-house of life. 

In the verse of Scripture from which our morning 
lesson is taken the gloomy prophet who loved shadow 
more than sunshine told Israel that they would never 
be worthy of possessing houses, that they must pass 
their days in tents. Mansions of brick and iron and 
marble were too good for their days of sin and doubt. 
Let us spiritualize all these thoughts and illustrations 
and find a lesson for the young and perhaps for the 
old in the reflection that in religion we must find a 
temporary but positive creed, and, reposing in it, wait 
for labor and merit and time to build for the soul a 
more solid philosophy of things here and hereafter. 
So many of the young are attempting to live these 
passing years without any form of religious belief, 
and so many are actually opposing all belief that it 
seems high time we should spiritualize some of the 
material habits of man and infer from his temporary 
house iii the woods or prairies and from his hastily- 
made bridges and stations and from the tent life of 
the old Hebrews, that perhaps a similar scene is 
visible in the realm of faith. Unable to find a full sst 
of articles of belief — a group in which no one shall 



26 A TEMP OR AR Y CREED. 

be of doubtful truthfulness — the young persons of the 
present should build a tent, a structure that will im- 
mediately shelter them from enemy and storm. The 
entire absence of a religious faith ought to be viewed 
as a personal loss, for man seems to possess a religious 
sentiment as truly as he possesses a musical senti- 
ment or a feeling of the pathetic or of the joyful. 
The strangeness of the surrounding universe, the 
mysterious origin of man, his strange experience for 
three-score years, his more strange death, all combine 
to waken the sentiment of religion — a tie which 
binds the mind to a God — the Author of all these 
strange surroundings. When a cultivated mind finds 
itself suddenly in the mountains of Switzerland or of 
Colorado or for the first time on the shore of the 
ocean, a feeling of deep wonder fills up all its length 
and breadth. This feeling is called the love of the 
beautiful or of the sublime. When the cultivated or 
common mind looks upon the universe and is sud- 
denly filled with a feeling that it has an Author great 
and wise and righteous, this feeling is not called the 
sentiment of the beautiful or sublime, but that of re- 
ligion. If you will analyze it you will find it to con- 
tain elements additional to those in the heart when 
it admires mountains or oceans or flowers. The val- 
ley of Yosemite has a greatness, but not a greatness 
that will affect you or me in life or in death, it will 



A TEMP OR AR Y CREED. 2J 

never reward us for virtue nor punish us for sin, it 
will never follow us and our family with a dark or a 
smiling providence. Thus all the magnificent things 
of land or sky are disjoined from you and me, from 
our grave and our cradle, and make up a peaceful 
emotion called the beautiful, but not so with the 
grandeur and power of God. They concern us. 
They are attached to a living person who fills all 
space and from whom we came and under whose 
hand we are living, and therefore it is that the senti- 
ment of religion stands apart and rises above other 
sentiments in power and solemnity. The greatness 
of God is a living, acting greatness. His sublimity 
is a living, acting force, and the soul beholding or 
meditating becomes filled with prayers or hymns or 
penitence or hopes. The strange emotion is almost 
universal, it is strong, it is of increasing interest to 
the close of life. Religion is the general name for all 
these beliefs and thoughts and emotions which spring 
up from the idea that our universe came from a God. 
From such an assumption many and great influences 
follow ; many actions follow, such as prayers, hymns, 
sacrifices, services, church-building and creed-making, 
and for all this varied form of human activity there 
stands the common name " religion. " 

The most active intellectual period known to his- 
tory is the present. Nothing escapes scrutiny. The 



28 A TEMPORARY CREED, 

laws of Russia, of Germany, of Ireland are undergoing 
review ; all instruments and machines and apparatus 
are being reconstructed; science is being re-written; 
history is re-studied and corrected ; and under this 
influence, good and bad, all the modern forms of faith 
have passed as though they too are to be purified in 
the modern flame. In a few instances it may be 
that Christianity has passed into the furnace of pure 
hostility, but as a general fact it has been cast into 
the same kind of refiner's fire as that which is testing 
science and political ideas — a fire which seeks with- 
out malice to separate the gold from its harmful 
alloy. The more mind is cultivated the more it 
asks for things in their purity. Civilization would 
purify the water it drinks, the air it breathes, the iron 
it uses in its places of power and trust, the gold it 
wears in jewels or uses in coin, the music it hears; 
and passing into the moral world it asks, how can I 
find a politics that is more perfectly true, a history 
less distorted by passion or ignorance ? and equally, 
with the same kindness and earnestness, it wonders 
how it can find what is most divine in the tenets and 
practices of the temple of God, If on all sides the 
thought of to-day is seeking what is closest to 
the absolute ideal, we must concede sincerity to 
those who are making many inquiries within the 
field of faith, for mankind has ceased to be willing 



A TEMP OR A R Y CREED. 29 

to wear dross when it can have gold, or to wear bright 
pebbles when diamonds may be found on the same 
shore. No question was ever asked with more sin- 
cerity than the common one of our times : " What am 
I to believe?'' It comes from persons in all the mod- 
ern denominations, from persons old and young, from 
young women as well as from young men, comes 
to us on the street, comes in the assemblage of 
friends, embodies itself in a letter and travels hundreds 
of miles in quest of help or sympathy. 

Whether intellect once awakened ever finds again 
the perfect repose of barbarism or of bigotry is of un- 
certain answer. Learning or meditation ought to 
bring peace, but we can not forecast the end, for we 
are still too near the beginning. Logical thought 
has just come into the world, and we can not yet sit 
down to a prognosis of the case. The storm must 
rage for a while before one can think of measuring 
its wrath. Philosophy bears of old the reputation of 
being peaceful. It gave peace to many from Plato to 
Newton. It is painted with white hair and a calm 
face, as though over that face all storms had ceased 
to roll. From this historic calmness of long thought 
came the lines of Pope : 

A little learning is a dangerous thing, 
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring ; 
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, 



3<D A TEMP OR AR Y CREED. 

And drinking largely sobers us again. 
Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts, 
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, 
While from the bounded level of our mind 
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, 
But more advanced, behold, with strange surprise, 
Now distant scenes of endless science rise. 

Coming as our age does from times of endless false- 
hoods and follies as parts of religion, the mind has 
become familiar with the destruction of tenets, and 
may well wonder whether anything will remain when 
a few more years shall have passed by. As in times 
of great epidemics the death scenes are so numerous 
that those in perfect health lose confidence in life and 
go about bewildered, as though already doomed to 
the grave, so in the great critical period around us so 
widespread has been the destruction of church notions 
that many are acting and feeling as though the end of 
God and heaven had come. This critical work is 
perhaps nearing its end, and it is probable that the 
scenes of life will soon surpass those of death, and 
that times of religious peace will come, not by way of 
barbarism or bigotry, but by way of that deeper 
second thought and longer and sweeter thought called 
philosophy. The Author of our world has not offered 
any premiums to barbarism or bigotry that those 
states of mind should bring more rest and peace than 
are granted those who study long and faithfully the 



A TEMPORARY CREED. 3 I 

problems of man as a religious and spiritual being. 

Unable in these days to build a solid structure, 
many young persons who do really desire to make 
the most of their few years on earth must dwell in 
tents or booths. There is material enough for the 
construction of these. 

Regarding the debated dogma of inspiration, 
while Professor Smith and his school and the German 
theologians are busy with their definitions and esti- 
mates you young persons can make a booth of 
boughs and logs and grasses and leaves which will 
be quite a home for seasons many or few. All re- 
ligion is one, and it will be a good part of a 
temporary creed should you assume that the Old and 
New Testaments are a history of the best stream of 
religion which has ever flowed through the world. 
It arose far back, and it has flowed far forward, and 
rich has been the valley watered by this flood, and 
richer is it now than it was when Abraham or Solo- 
mon stood on its banks. You need not know what 
was the actual history of Samson, or whether Joshua 
actually had an order from God to destroy all the 
heathen, and suffer not even an infant to live ; it is 
enough that in those old records you find the life of 
worship written down as it passed along from infancy 
to manhood. If that evolution of doctrine culminated 
in the teachings of Jesus, then you can throw away 



32 A TEMPORARY CREED. 

all ideas which do not harmonize with that Nazarene 
standard. In London Bank each gold coin is weighed 
as it comes in, and if it does not move the balances in 
just the right manner it is degraded and sent to its 
own lower seat to be made over again and be made 
honorable. Thus, so far as you are concerned, a the- 
ory of inspiration will be good enough that shall 
make Jesus Christ the standard of moral excellence. 
To him you can bring the polygamy and slavery and 
exterminating wars of the Mosaic period, and can 
thus learn that they were more human than divine. 
The scientific statements of the Bible were all human ; 
and if you will compare all of the old morals with 
that of Jesus you will find what was temporary and 
what eternal in the laws of sacred antiquity. Christ 
is thus a measuring line for all of that old ocean ; a 
guiding star in that rather stormy sea. And in the 
New Testament, if doubts arise over words of Paul or 
John or James, go back to Christ and feel no alarm 
while his meaning is clear and most lofty. The 
words of Jesus alone are enough to save the soul in 
this world and in any subsequent career. These 
words are not the whole of Christianity, but they will 
form a tent in which the truth-seeker can dwell while 
the walls of some final mental structure may be grad- 
ually rising. 

Pass now to the inquiry as to the nature of Christ. 



A TEMPORAR Y CREED. 3 3 

For eighteen hundred years the question has been, 
what is Christ ? Is he the very God ? Is he the equal 
of God ? To this day when a theological seminary 
or a presbytery wishes to test all the forms of ability 
in a candidate for the pulpit the authorities require 
him to write an essay upon the theme Quid est 
Christies? No amount of centuries will ever settle 
the question, simply because it is indeterminable — for 
two reasons: no one knows what Christ is, and no 
one knows what God is, nor can ever know in this 
life. In the former instance the evidence was all in 
fully eighteen hundred years ago, and as that has 
been reviewed over and over by all the religious 
teachers of each generation and no undeniable or clear 
conclusion has been reached, there remains no hope 
that exactly what Christ was or is will ever be known 
this side of heaven. In most of theological proposi- 
tions there must be a vagueness which does not be- 
long to material sciences. Man can measure a sea or 
a mountain but not a Christ. An English scholar 
says : " There is no preaching more offensive to edu- 
cated men than that which puts forward with un- 
blushing assurance all manner of assumptions and 
irrelevancies as cogent and irrefragable demonstra- 
tions. For theology is a science full of mystery; we 
are met almost at every step by the unknowable." 
One of these unknowable things is the exact nature 
3 



34 A TEMPORAR Y CREED, 

of Jesus. In this one particular make up your mind 
to dwell all your days in a tent. It so happens that 
no harm need come from the indeterminable in Jesus for 
all that the heart need believe is that he was the Son 
of God, divinely sent to be the adequate Savior of all 
who should love and follow him. It is enough that 
his character is so human and so divine that all the 
types of religious soul can find in this God-sent being 
the beauty they severally love and require. All the 
grandest things in our universe are so full and vast 
and varied as to be beyond analysis. The beauty of 
morning and evening in June cannot be gathered up 
and expressed, nor can one explain what it is in music 
that confers upon it such a power to charm and to 
fill with almost heavenly peace. If thus Christ is 
without definite human or divine nature none but a 
conceited theologian should betray any alarm. All 
moral and religious and great souls can find their in- 
spiration in Him. Whittier goes to the Nazarene for 
philanthrophy : 

Whatever in love's name is truly done 

To free the slave or free the fallen one 

Is done to Christ. Whoso in deed and word 

Is not against him labors for the Lord. 

When He who sad and weary longing sore 

For love's sweet service sought the sisters' door, — 

One saw the heavenly, one the human guest; 

But who shall say which loved the Master best ? 



A TEMPORARY CREED. 35 

Thus to Christ all may repair with personal success. 
Some are thrown into doubts or unbelief by the older 
evangelical doctrines of hell and heaven. Here there 
seems but one form of advice possible, and that must 
be to throw away boldly the opinions of the past. 
The past was accustomed to burn men for opinions' 
sake ; we are all of kinder heart and will now spare 
the men and burn the opinions. The former times 
not only were full of superstition and credulity and 
cruelty but they aspired to quite a familiar knowledge 
of God and eternity. Hell was apart of the church's 
explored territory. All its torments were known 
and its groans heard and counted. Thither were sent 
not only criminals but millions who did not believe 
in enough of dogmas, and other millions who were 
born for that special and awful destiny. So fearful 
and unreasonable and dishonorable to man and God 
are all those old details about future punishment that 
the modern mind must if possible wash itself white of 
those sad memories and must encamp in a mere tent 
until time or eternity shall cast some new light upon 
the condition of the good and the wicked beyond the 
grave. While these years may be building some solid 
house of faith you need not be homeless in storm and 
cold, but you can construct a temporary house that 
may last you either till men have grown wiser or until 
bursting the veil of death you shall move on to bright- 



36 A TEMPORARY CREED. 

er light. Under all the figures of the New Testament 
and the awful imagery of even pagan lands lies the 
one thought: It shall be ill with the wicked, it shall 
be well with the righteous — a doctrine out of which 
may come a lifelong effort to avoid sin and to follow 
the highest laws of God. 

Details you need not know in any of these vast 
forms of thought. You could not know them if you 
would. The genius of our age is philosophy and 
the spirit of philosophy is found in a willingness to 
rest in a few general principles. Its serenity like that 
of Emerson and Longfellow and of the whole group of 
such noble characters is not the result of a universal 
knowledge but of a willingness to assume that the 
universe transcends the mind of man — the serenity 
that comes from a willingness to be as only children 
wandering on the infinite shore. As the truly large 
soul is willing that its house and furniture and dress 
and equipage shall be simple and simple its language, 
so entering the domain of religion it repeats the charm 
of its life and asks for only outlines of God and Jesus 
and of the destinies of the wicked and the virtuous 
when they go from earth to their final award. It is 
one of the phenomena of time that the more positive 
and detailed information one seeks of eternal things 
the smaller must be the mind that must be consulted 
in this appeal — a mind which cannot dream of the 



A TEMPORARY CREED. 37 

awful greatness of the Almighty nor realize that man 
dwells upon an island world with a mysterious sea on 
every side. The noblest and most powerful intellects 
grasp the situation and instead of rebelling or giving 
up in despair they move to and fro carrying in the 
night a beautiful torch — waiting for the Sun to rise. 
Thus all ye young hearts ! who are feeling deeply 
the many and acute denials of the day, do not join in 
the wild crusade against faith, but consent gladly to 
dwell in tents. Pitch them in city or in country, on 
hilltop or by the placid stream. Plant by the door 
the flag of two worlds, its emblems a cross and a 
crown, and within these structures sing ye the joyful 
hymns of the two w r orlds ; and when days have 
come and gone and come and gone the earthly house 
of encampment will be supplanted by something bet- 
ter in this world or else by the house not made with 
hands, eternal and in the heavens. 



III. 

MORAL ESTHETICS. 



How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
bringelh good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringtth good 
tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith unto Zion, "Thy 
God reigneth." — Isaiah, 52:7. 

A single word often becomes an indicator of the 
drift of popular thought. As there are metal marks 
which record the rise and fall of waters in lakes and 
rivers, so are there words which tell what the multi- 
tude is most busied over, for or against. When some 
of the older ones of us were young the word " esthet- 
ics " was imprisoned in dictionaries. It was some- 
times let out for recreation around college grounds. 
There the professor of " Belles Lettres " was wont to 
tell the highest class from what Greek word the term 
came, but when these young men left the college to 
go forth into the world they always left that word 
in the institution along with the other properties of 
the great seat of learning. Of late years that term 
has dared venture out into the same wide world and 
it will never go back again to the cell of the scholastic. 
It must take its place now alongside such allies as 

(38) 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 



39 



" taste," "judgment," " appreciation," and " percep- 
tion," and must live a public life. It stands for the 
world's power to perceive the beautiful. It stands 
for one of the greatest and noblest qualities and capa- 
bilities of the mind. 

There are nations or tribes which do not know of 
the existence of a God nor dream of any such person 
and which entertain no thought of a second life, but 
there is no tribe or race which is not aware of such a 
something as the " beautiful." Either by feathers or 
by paint or by tattooing or by rings or by strings of 
small shells the Negro and the Indian attempt to 
gratify a sense of the attractive, and while we differ 
from them in the forms which beauty takes we ac- 
cord them the possession of that sentiment which is 
always feeling after a pleasing shape or color or series 
of forms. The Indian loves a string of small shells, 
the American prefers a string of pearls or diamonds, 
the assembling of things is common to both ; the 
African women love rings of iron, the Saxon rings of 
pure gold, but the neatness and form of the ring are 
common to both. Thus in some one respect all the 
varying tastes of the human family converge and we 
have before us a sentiment of the beautiful which is 
as wide as the empire of man. The whole race of 
man found in any time or place loves the beautiful. 

Not only is this feeling universal but it is powerful. 



40 MORAL ESTHETICS. 

It sways a scepter charmingly despotic and com- 
mands time and money like a King. It has given 
rise to five fine arts which consume millions of money. 
How expensive is architecture ! While a five thou- 
sand-dollar-house would secure comfort for a family a 
hundred thousand or a half million dollars goes into 
the home as architecture or decoration for the sake 
of the sentiment of those who are to dwell in the 
abode. The piano must be beautiful, the plate beau- 
tiful, the floor beautiful, the ceilings, the walls, the 
stairs, the hinges, the very nails must be all marked 
with ornament. Other fine arts as truly consume 
money so that one who thinks of the matter for a 
moment will conclude that man is out upon a lifelong 
search after the attractive and that his labor and 
money follow his heart. The columns and the walls 
and gardens and statues and pictures and plates of the 
whole past assure us that the civilized races have 
always been pouring out money like water upon the 
altar of this one goddess of the pantheon. Old Roman 
millionaires have given feasts which cost each eighty 
thousand dollars. It was once the fashion for the 
guest to take home with him the dishes on which he 
ate and sometimes a favorite friend would go from the 
dinner attended by slaves of the host who were carry- 
ing home for the guest ten thousand dollars worth of 
goblets and dishes. The worship of external forms 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 4 1 

and decorations changes its shape but it is the one 
everlasting worship. One epoch may delight in 
marble, another in brass, another in tapestry and 
laces, another in porcelains, but the delight is alway 
present in the very soul of civilization — a river which 
changes its waters but flows continually. 

Having thus marked what a lover of beauty man 
has been, and that the physical earth supplies him 
with materials and suggestions and forms w 7 hich may 
be made to gratify this universal taste we may also 
note now that a counter world springs up in man's 
spiritual hemisphere and that then a still higher form 
of beauty may be found. In its physical form art 
generally attempts to make us realize some spiritual 
quality of great excellence, and does not work for 
the attractiveness of the physical form alone. In the 
architecture of the classics the mind was not to say 
only "How white and lofty and ornate is this marble ?" 
but also, " How great is this god ! How grand the 
oratory in these walls ! How benevolent this Minerva ! 
How just this Jove ! " In Christian art the well-known 
faces of the "Madonna" and the "Christ" are the long 
patient efforts of genius to describe great souls. A 
soul is itself invisible, but the eye and forehead and 
mouth and all the face and form throw out great hints 
of what is hidden in the brain and heart. The 
images called "Madonna" and "Christ" are only the 



42 MORAL ESTHETICS. 



efforts of human skill to deal not with paints and 
marbles but with soul. The beauty of form combines 
with beauty of spirit and acting in a happy partner- 
ship they make a work in art. Real high art deals 
in the material that it may express the spiritual and 
is thus always assuring us that the domain of physical 
charm is completed by the kingdom of the intellectual 
or moral charm. The artists who attempted to 
picture a Christ were not struggling with paint and 
canvas and preparations, but with the self-denial and 
modesty and purity and love and heroism of Jesus. 
The great soul of Nazareth retreated before the artist, 
and pause where he might that dear object at once 
appeared far beyond, and left painter and sculptor 
busy with the effort to reach the end of the infinite. 
The difficulty of art has always been the difficulty of 
throwing a bridge across that gulf which yawns so 
vast between the physical and the mental worlds. 

The purpose of music does not lie wholly in the 
pleasing harmony of sounds, but chiefly in that strange 
experience the soul passes through as the piece pro- 
gresses. At the close of a sonata or symphony by a 
great composer the heart able to appreciate the river 
of melody finds that it has been far away from the 
small and wicked things of earth, has been filled with 
a divine presence, has re-called all early and holy 
friendships, has remembered the beloved dead and 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 43 

has seen some of the sweet mysteries of the future ; 
for the hour it has been full of charity, full of for- 
giveness, full of purity, full of affection, full of fond 
remembrance. Thus this form of art like architecture 
and painting and sculpture hastens to declare itself to 
be a study of the human soul — an effort to deal not in, 
material but in moral things. 

We conclude therefore that above the beautiful in 
art there is lying in sweet repose, the beautiful in 
mind and that much of physical beauty is only a lad- 
der like that of Jacob's dream to carry us to the 
hights. The Apollo of the Vatican awakens first the 
sense of physical perfection. The beholder is charmed 
with the beauty of each detail of the masterpiece from 
finger to forehead, but this physical value soon gives 
place to other charms and as Winkelmann expresses 
it: " Penetrated with the conviction of his power 
and lost in a concentrated joy the look of the 
figure reaches into the infinite. Disdain sits upon 
the lips, indignation is seen in the nostrils and it as- 
cends to the eyebrows, but an unchangeable serenity 
is painted on the forehead and the eye itself is full of 
sweetness as though the Muses were caressing him." 
Thus by the ladder art, the angels of the soul go up- 
ward and escape the valley where the head has to be 
content often with a pillow of stones. 

After this excensus we seem better prepared now 



44 MORAL ESTHETICS. 

to approach that picture painted by Isaiah and after- 
ward copied by St. Paul. The fact that Paul did not 
make an exact copy shows that inspiration has refer- 
ence to the substance of things and not to words nor 
minute specifications. Isaiah and Paul alike saw one 
figure, and behold it lay wholly within the kingdom of 
moral loveliness. What may have been its costume, 
in what colors it may have advanced, out of what 
texture its raiment were woven, what flower may have 
been held in the hand are all omitted by the enthu- 
siasm and admiration which cried out," How beauti- 
ful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth 
good tidings, that publisheth peace, that publisheth 
Salvation, that saith to Zion, 'Thy God reigneth.' M 
Isaiah and Paul saw him " On the mountains " be- 
cause such a sublime figure must repose upon a noble 
pedestal and because he must be far above the vale 
of unworthy human life. The mountains with the 
decoration of tree and flower and clear air and back- 
ground of peaceful blue — the mountains with their 
ideas of grandeur and power make up the material 
elements in the picture, but these all are only invita- 
tions to the mind to awake and admire the soul that 
brings good tidings, that scatters peace among men 
and fills them with a faith in God. All our wonder 
about garments and drapery cease when the dream 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 45 

of peace and righteousness and faith begins to unfold 
in the spectator's heart. 

It must be inferred from this study that there is a 
moral esthetics which outranks the physical forms of 
beauty. This moral kingdom does not destroy the 
other empire. It is the old story of " empire within 
empire " "wheel within wheel " ; but with this caution 
that moral beauty is the greater of the two kingdoms. 
That hand would be the rude one of a savage which 
should harm a carved leaf or a flower or a rational 
decoration upon any wall or floor, any ornament on 
metal or glass or earthenware or wood ; but loving 
and keeping all these society must feel that these are 
all hints at the immense worth of spiritual things 
in the same world. An age can be great only when 
it is carrying forward that mental power of brain and 
soul whose merit it was the province of art to 
express and enhance. If old sculptors attempted to 
draw or carve a Socrates or a Pericles or a Jove or an 
Athene it was because some mental quality of Socrates 
or Pericles or Athene had become so impressive that it 
asked for perpetual remembrance and 'if subsequent 
skill struggled to produce a portrait of Jesus and his 
mother was it because the souls of these two beings 
had won a fame w r hich made them the subjects of art, 
— thus hinting at the fact that moral beauty is the 
reason of physical art. Great will be our civilization 



46 MORAL ESTHETICS. 

when this moral esthetics shall keep pace with the 
ornamentation upon our walls and in the many de- 
partments of physical charm. The morality which 
will restrain you all from murder or theft or house- 
burning is such a plain line of duty that it is not to 
satisfy the mind, for there is a powerful compulsion 
of many forms along that highway. It is when mo- 
rality passes away from those common forms and 
becomes busy with those shapes of action not possible 
to a common, rude intellect, that it becomes a fine 
art or a supreme expression of the beautiful. If it be 
true that Auerbach wept over the sufferings of the 
Jews in Russia that is a moral esthetics which an 
Isaiah or a Paul, both Jews, could appreciate, and we 
might hear them saying from their graves : " How 
beautiful in the mountains of this century are the eyes 
of him who weeps over cruel wrong and whose looks 
publish peace and salvation ! " A specimen this pic- 
ture of that moral taste which the world needs more 
than it needs a taste for music or pictures. In a scene 
in London last week where Cardinal Manning pre- 
sided, fifty thousand dollars were subscribed for the 
help of the persecuted Israelites in Russia, there was 
more beauty than in a landscape by Claude Lorrain or 
in a design on a Pompeii wall. What is more pathetic 
than the history, modern and earlier, of the Jews after 
the ruin of their empire ! What untold sorrows 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 47 

have they encountered in lands called Christian ! 
Against such a dark background the intercession of 
Catholics and Protestants and their gifts of money 
and pity show like the rainbow on clouds. Were it 
in the power of American and English Christians to 
go to each Jewish home in Russia with love and per- 
fect deliverance, how beautiful upon those mountains 
would be the feet of those who should carry such 
good tidings, who should proclaim such a salvation 
and say to that Zion, " Your God still reigns ! " 

It is said and oft repeated that there are in this 
city refined, well-educated girls who are sewing all 
the days of all the weeks of all their young years for 
a reward of twenty cents a day. Out of this must 
come food and clothing and the many expenses of 
life, for sweet as life is it costs money to live. It is 
said that some of these toiling ones obeying a tender 
nature are supporting little brothers or sisters or a 
helpless father or mother. It is further stated that at 
last the hearts of many of these girls become hope- 
less, and in despair of any noble future they part com- 
pany with their mother and their God. What moral 
sublimity would there be in the individual or in the 
community which should rise up in behalf of these 
girls, and in some manner show them that their tears 
are seen by the wakeful eyes of our rich and enlight- 
ened century. How beautiful on the heights shall be 



48 MORAL ESTHETICS. 

the feet that will bring glad tidings to these daughters 
of toil, shall bring salvation and tell them that their 
God still reigns ! 

Many of the cities of the land are now deeply pon- 
dering over the disgrace and ruin which gambling 
and intemperance and corrupt dramatic entertain- 
ments are bringing to tens of thousands who ought in 
such a country to be noble and happy. The public 
is more moral than ever before, but for that reason all 
that is criminal and debasing makes a blacker line 
upon the canvas. The blacker the cloud the more 
brilliant the rainbow. So upon the much whitened 
surface of our age crimes and vices stand out in 
awful blackness. Polygamy was permitted in the 
times of Abraham, but it becomes a repulsive mon- 
ster in the land of Washington. Were it not that our 
age were much better than its predecessors there 
would remain no inducement for further philanthropic 
effort. If after the preaching of the last hundred 
years and after we have seen pouring along the great 
flood of public education and literature and religion 
and all forms of culture, the drama is more corrupt 
than ever and drunkenness more universal, then may 
the heart cease to hope for a better civilization and 
the feet on the mountain tops are beautiful in vain. 
There is no logic in effort if effort is powerless. It 
seems evident that all the efforts of the church and 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 49 

the moralists and of high literature and high art 
have met with success — a success large enough to 
become the deep inspiration of to-day and to-morrow. 
The complaining ascetics of the dark ages were mill- 
stones upon the necks of the people and made the 
years dark by their uprisings, but the Roman Catho- 
lics of America marched out of that monasticism and 
they see around the altars a multitude far more intel- 
ligent and moral and happy than were the throngs of 
the sixteenth century. In God's world a plant placed 
in a cellar will reach out toward the window, and if the 
plant be a vine it will creep across the dark damp 
room that it may drink in the sweet sunlight. But 
God loves man more than He loves the rose or the 
ivy, dear as they are to Him, and He has made 
society such that from the recesses of its darkened 
room it will always creep toward the beams of light. 
It does not run indeed; it creeps, but it goes ! 

Moral esthetics is what our age now needs. Phys- 
ical beauty is only an effort to express moral beauty. 
The two beautiful figures in Constant Meyer's " Con- 
solation," the sweet face of the nun and the hopeful 
eye of the soldier, are efforts of art to express the love 
of the " Sister" and the yet deeper love of religion. 
Thus all our physical beauty along the street or in 
our homes should be a perpetual reminder that there 
lies far above such objects of sense a spiritual sym- 



50 MORAL ESTHETICS. 

metry and harmony divine and everlasting, and this 
is the city toward which all the paths of time and 
sense should lead. 

" Beautiful faces are those that wear — ■] 

It matters little of dark or fair, 

Whole-souled honesty printed there. 
" Beautiful eyes are those that show, 

Like crystal panes where hearth-fires glow, 

Beautiful thoughts that burn below. 
*' Beautiful lips are those whose words 

Leap from the heart like songs of birds, 

Yet whose utterance prudence girds. 

<l Beautiful hands are those that do 
Work that is earnest, and brave and true, 
Moment by moment, the long day through. 

*' Beautiful feet are those that go 
On kindly ministry to and fro, 
Down lowliest ways if God wills so. 

" Beautiful shoulders are those that bear 

Ceaseless burdens of homely care 

With patient grace and daily prayer. 
<{ Beautiful lives are those that bless— 

Silent rivers of happiness, 

Whose hidden fountains but few may guess. 

" Beautiful twilight at set of sun 
Beautiful goal with race well run 
Beautiful rest with work well done. 

u Beautiful grave where grasses creep, 
Where brown leaves fall, where drifts lie deep 
Over worn-out hands— Oh beautiful sleep 1 " 



MORAL ESTHETICS. 5 I 

Before we dismiss our subject, let us all feel willing 
to declare that that Divine One of Nazareth is the 
source from which there has flowed into our cen- 
tury the most of this stream of moral beauty, and of 
the moral taste. His forms and designs, and deco- 
rations and ornaments, and his music were all in his 
heart. His forehead was noble in its thoughts, his 
eye and face in their benignity, his lips were beautiful 
in their words, his heart beautiful in its purity, his 
hands beautiful in their charity, his death beautiful in 
its intercession. Under such a Leader our material 
arts and our spiritual perceptions are moving slowly 
forward. Whither ? Let us be true to the highest 
ideal and to the best reason, and say, " Toward a 
supreme city called — Heaven; toward a Supreme 
Being called — God." 



IV. 
CIVILIZATION. 



Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward and the spirit 
of the beast that goeth downward toward the earth ? — EccLESiAbTES, 
iii: 21. 

In an hour of distrust the author of the book of 
Ecclesiastes asks, " Who really knows anything about 
that spirit of man which has such an upward tendency, 
and who knows anything about that mind of the 
beast which looks downward toward the earth ? " 
The common impression, indeed, prevails, that man is 
a high kind of being, and will climb in this world, and 
dying will rise to a new height; and there is a com- 
mon impression that the beast looks down for his 
food and will always go downward until he shall have 
become dust. But who knows the real state of the 
case ? It may be that all man's looking up will be 
labor and hope lost, and that he will meet at last, in 
the common dust, the brute, which looked down? 
" That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth 
beasts, one thing befalleth them, as the one dieth, so 
dieth the other, they have all one breath, so that man 

(52) 



CIVILIZATION. 



53 



hath no pre-eminence over the beasts." Out of this 
sober soliloquy the wise man soon emerged, and 
seeing the real upward movement of man he drew a 
conclusion as to the whole of human duty — to fear 
God and keep His commandments. 

This old meditation is able to awaken in our far-off 
time the reflection that man is a spirit which tends 
upward, and is thus distinguishable from the entire 
brute world— a reflection which makes me ask the 
question : What is civilization but an accumulation 
of the many forms of this upward progress? Civil- 
ization is the result of obeying the commandments of 
God, or the natural laws of society. In our century, 
which surpasses all its predecessors in the conviction, 
at least, that it has found a high condition of human 
welfare, a special study might well be made of the 
term, civilization, that we all may know what is the 
prize of national and personal life, and what part of 
that prize has been already won. It is my own im- 
pression that the fearing of God and the keeping of 
His commandments, is such a summing up of the 
elements of civilization as no modern definition can 
surpass. In order that this may be true, the laws of 
God must be made the equivalent of the laws of nat- 
ure. His commandments must not be simply the 
ten of the Decalogue, nor the additional special com- 
mands of Christianity, or of any special religion, but 



5 4 CI VI LIZ A TION. 



they must be the laws of all action and being. The 
constant discovery and obedience of law are the 
causes which push onward the human multitude. 
The beauty of the lilies, whidh Christ saw and ad- 
mired, came from their keeping the laws of their part 
of the universe. They lived up fully to the statutes 
of sunshine and soil, and rain, and wind, and dew. 
They differ from man in two particulars — they do not 
need to study and discover their laws, and need not 
consciously obey them. Man must first find his law, 
he must afterward be willing to obey it, but aside 
from these two embarrassments man is like the lily, 
his glory comes from the fact and obedience of law. 
His beauty and color and perfume are called by a 
peculiar name, civilization. 

Why may not civilization be a perfect following of 
natural law, regardless of the notion that the law 
must have come from a God ? Is not its essence con- 
tained in the discovery and obeying of natural regu- 
lations, regardless of the question, "Who or what 
this nature may be?" It may be that the knowledge 
and the obedience are the essential elements of this 
progress, but an atheistic theory of our world omits 
the fact that many laws are made impressive only by 
the assumption that they came from an intelligent 
law-maker, and the greater this law-giver, the more 
powerful are the statutes. A few words found writ- 



CIVILIZATION, 55 



ten in a legal form but in some old dead language 
would not secure any great modern regard, for the 
reader who might see the law would at once remem- 
ber that the Egyptian or Sanscrit or Greek crown 
which had enacted it had become dust ; but were we 
in England and the same words were placed before 
us, as the imperative rule of the land, we should feel 
that the formula contained a strange inner power. 
The relation of a law-maker to the destiny of law is 
thus intimate, and when the mental and moral and 
physical rules of humanity are conceived of as com- 
ing from One, omniscient and all-powerful and 
righteous — the infinite Creator of the universe — those 
rules contain within them a potency which atheism 
dare not claim. There are many laws of society 
which do not ask for any external dignity. Man will 
seek food and drink without waiting to inquire who 
made the laws of hunger and thirst ; in the universe 
of an atheist, man would attempt to keep out of the 
fire and out of the water, but there are laws of morals, 
of right and wrong, of nobleness and honor, and 
benevolence and personal greatness, which derive a 
new importance from the feeling that they are the will 
of a great God. The long roll of heroes, political and 
religious, has resulted from the feeling that God 
places men in great crises and carries forward His 
plans through these earthly soldiers. Beneath the 



q6 CIVILIZATION. 



self-denial of the missionary, within the eloquence of 
the philanthropist, under the dust-cloud of the wars 
for freedom, under the head of the dying patriot we 
can all see the form of God as being the explanation 
of all sublime good, the consolation of each religious 
tear. Looking at the constitution of the human mind 
and heart, one cannot but feel that the obligation of a 
law depends largely upon an attendant feeling that 
the law is the will of some power not easily avoided 
by the wicked and worthy of all hope and love of the 
good. If a material universe has evolved the idea 
that man must be virtuous, it is indeed a noble prin- 
ciple, but that law is awful in sublimity if it came 
from an infinite Creator who can make ten thousand 
worlds, and toward whose presence we are marching 
by the way of the grave. It seems, therefore, an im- 
portant element in civilization that it is a following of 
the laws passed by an Infinite God. 

Assuming then this value of the Lawmaker, let us ask 
what are those laws, the obedience of which makes 
man pass upward above all the brute conditions ? 
The answer has at last become perfectly obvious. 
All laws, physical, mental, and industrial, and moral, 
play an essential part in this large human drama. Of 
all the ages which have passed over man the present 
age alone has learned that man is not a simple result 
from one cause, but that he is a resultant — a picture 



CIVILIZA TION. 5 7 



composed like a mosaic. His soul rises when his 
body and mind rise, and all suffers when any part is 
denied the advantages of the three-score years in this 
world. Our age only sees the manysidedness — the 
immense breadth of man, and therefore comes nearest 
to making a promise to the future of furnishing it with 
a civilization. Not yet has our era reached a perfect 
or a very high manhood, but it certainly is the one 
permitted first to note the fact, that human welfare is 
a stream made up of a confluence of many streams 
many of which were not named or even marked in the 
geographies of the past. 

In surveying history we readily learn that the Greeks 
failed to produce the highest order of society because 
they did not study enough of the laws of man to make 
him move wholly upward. They discovered only 
some of the points in which he was superior to the 
brute. The intellectual and esthetic in the soul, 
were wonderfully developed in that marvelous penin- 
sula and these yielded so large results that the age 
seemed to have all riches. The arts and literature 
overshadowed all else. They monopolized Greece 
and reduced to starvation other adjuncts of human 
nature. When the pine-trees have the early woods all 
to themselves they hold the soil against all other forms 
of tree and plant, and no oak or maple can be found. 
No wild-flower or wild-berry can find air and sunshine 



58 CIVILIZATION. 



enough to make their life possible. All is solitude 
except as to the one companion — the pine, the color 
is the green of pine, the perfume is that of pine, the 
breeze is that which sighs through pine. It is all 
beautiful but not with the beauty of a world but with 
only the limited charms of the pine. When a tornado 
sweeps along and cuts out great openings in this old 
monopoly then the maple finds room for its autumn 
tints, and the wild blackberry and strawberry time and 
chance for their flower and their harvest for the birds. 
These hasten into the opening to show how broad 
the world is in its vegetable kingdom. Greece was 
too much a field that grew only one product — broad 
compared with the Asia that was dying behind it, 
narrow as seen beside that condition of mankind 
which lay far away in the advance. It was necessary 
storms should come and make openings in the great 
forest and prepare a welcome for the morals of Jesus 
and the mental philosophies and physical sciences of 
other times. 

Christianity has generally repeated the blunder of 
underestimating the breadth of God's laws and has 
attempted to make a civilization out of a plan of salva- 
tion. Not only are the ten commandments too nar- 
row a basis of human greatness but in all the doctrines 
of what the churches call "salvation" taken together, 
too limited to compel the spirit of man to go upwards. 



CIVILIZATION. 59 



Taken alone they make a bird with one wing which 
can flutter but not fly. The Christians of the middle 
ages were thus imperfect, and the imperfection crowd- 
ed close upon modern times. The question what 
must man do to be saved ? is of immense importance 
but it is only one of the great inquiries of our world 
and it turns into an evil when it displaces such 
questions as what must man do to be well-governed, 
or well-educated, or well-housed, or well-mannered, 
or well-respected ? Progress is not the obedience of 
the gospel alone but it is also the obedience of science 
and art, for the same God that made man a candidate 
for Heaven, made him also a candidate for a school- 
house and an industry. The fifteenth century was full 
of religious faith, but it was equally full of idleness and 
ignorance. The only laws sought by scholars were the 
laws of a future salvation. All defined and redefined 
the terms of theology and failed to define such words 
as agriculture, and mechanics, and industry, and liber- 
ty, and equality. The whole human family attempted 
to walk as upon one foot and less of an advance was 
made in the first sixteen centuries than has been made 
in the last three. Walking through the sixteenth cen- 
tury you would have found each man you met to be a 
Christian but you would have found him to be also a 
beggar. Xo one studied or dreamed of such a thing 
as a noble and great society upon earth. All were busy 



60 CIVILIZATION. 



preparing for another world — some begging their way 
thitherward, some weeping out their time, some filling 
up forty or fifty consecutive years with solitary med- 
itation. In all these dreary ages civilization was im- 
possible, and for each one bright name admitted for 
some one merit into history, millions upon millions 
died without possessing any knowledge of human 
rights and privileges, and possible greatness, and not 
knowing anything of the earth or of the country that 
was to give them an unknown grave. 

He would be an enemy of the human race who 
should cast any contempt upon the question proposed 
to men : " Are you a Christian ?" but the spirit of 
man can not rise by such a study alone, but also by 
working out affirmative answers to such other ques- 
tions as these : " Are you an industrious man ? Are 
you a righteous man ? Are you a temperate man ? 
Are you a thoughtful man ? Are you a kind man ? " 
Out of a score of such affirmative replies the great- 
ness of society rises like those majestic trees in Cali- 
fornia which spring from a soil deep as the trees are 
high, and which spread their toughs in an air ever 
mild and full of life from mountain or sea. The 
whole duty of man is to keep the commandments of 
God, but if those commandments lie like a network 
all over earth, then the man or the age that is keep- 
ing only the commandments of simple piety is not 



CIVILIZATION. 6 1 



regarding God, but is disregarding His word in many 
great particulars. The question " Are you religious?" 
is only one in the great catechism of Nature, and it 
may be answered by man as a child. Greece said to 
each citizen, " Are you a lover of the beautiful ?" 
Rome said " Are you a military man ?" The middle 
centuries said "Are you orthodox in the faith?" 
The chivalric period said "Are you romantic? Can 
you ride way after the hounds ?" Each age said yes, 
and was as weak and narrow as the sunlight that 
would pass through the eye of a needle. To be 
valuable the sunlight must pour through a vast win- 
dow; best is it when there is no window at all, but 
when it pours down from the whole broad sky. 

Our era has not come to a perfect human welfare, 
but it has done so much toward solving great ques- 
tions of progress that it begins to throw great light 
upon the inquiry, " What constitutes the civilized 
condition?" Religion or morals, as coming from 
God, must be a component part. The intellectual 
life of our period is also an essential part, for man 
must be so awakened and so mentally* strong that he 
can perceive the relations and obligations of society. 
The mind must be so enlightened that such ideas as 
the slavery of a fellow creature will not be retained in 
its pure depths; so enlightened that the notion of 
religious persecution can find no favor. How fatal is 



62 CIVILIZATION. 



the absence of intellectual power, may be inferred 
from scenes now taking place in the rural districts in 
Russia, where Christians are mobbing the Jews, and 
doing this in the name of God; not having yet 
reached the intellectual power to realize that God is 
not a highwayman nor an infinite assassin. Russia 
is thus seen to be far away from the shores of an 
ideal humanity, for having religion without intellect- 
ual power, her peasantry are liable to become as 
madmen, and to make their villages red with blood 
and fire — a fact showing how deeply the Church 
injured society in those periods when it taught a way 
of salvation without teaching or studying all the 
sciences of this world. The streams of blood which 
flowed all over Europe in the triumphant days of the 
Church, compel us to admit that man may say his 
prayers at the altar and then emerge from his worship 
having many elements of the wild brute — the com- 
mandments of God being not those of religion alone, 
but of a wide and varied life. 

Not only in Russia is civilization made imperfect 
and frail by the absence of a broad and deep intelli- 
gence, but so in our continent, which is the most 
lofty of all nations, the spirit of man is held down- 
ward by millstones upon the aching neck. The nation 
which pays millions a year for carrying imaginary 
mail-bags along imaginary highways by means of 



CIVILIZA TION. 63 



imaginary steamboats and shadow horses and shadow 
wagons, is as yet a nation of mingled children and 
thieves ; — of which charity hopes the children are in 
the majority. The nation which permits a band of 
Mormons not only to defy all its own laws and to soil 
its good name, but to send emissaries all over Europe 
to ply black arts upon the soft minds of the ignorant 
and helpless, must be confessed to be a nation whose 
greatness is a matter of hope more than of fruition. 
And it must also be admitted that a government 
which will license three thousand saloons in any large 
city has many of the traits of the old Judas, in that it 
betrays its own youth to ruin for an income of silver. 
Of these specimen vices there is no explanation 
possible except that found in the fact that civilization 
comes from barbarism, and has not yet gotten out of 
sight of its ancestor. 

We seem to have found two elements in a high 
civilization — religion and intellectual power. But this 
power needs a further remark. Mental life comes 
from the presence and dignity of labor. A great age 
must be one of manual industry, of* popular and 
fashionable industry, because idleness of body passes 
to the mind, and is always an emblem of a coming 
sleep. The roar of physical action is an unfailing 
sign that the spiritual activity is real. Thus the 
mason and carpenter, and the plowman and the mer- 



64 CIVILIZA TION. 



chant arouse the scholar and the student, and the din of 
the material is repeated softly in the soul. The flying 
train and the sailing ship help make the verses of the 
poet, and the wisdom of the president, and the discov- 
eries of the inventor. It is a glory of our country 
that its wheels, and spindles, and plows have waked 
the mind from repose and made it a creator of the 
good. 

The commandments of God are thus seen to reach 
out and include the numberless pursuits of the shop 
and field. Equally do they include the pursuit of the 
beautiful ; for if man must perceive the relations 
around him, he must by some means reach a sensi- 
bility of nature that these wants of his fellow man 
may picture themselves upon his spirit Some power 
must polish the plate upon which the most delicate 
image is to fall. A cultivated mother will waken if 
her child even sighs in the night; but by the side of 
a half-drunken father a little son can strangle and 
struggle and die. Sensibility is one of the divinest 
elements of a perfect society, and this is the fact 
which points out the office of the beautiful in the 
career of mankind. Under that term falls the grand, 
the lovely, the pathetic, and from these as embodied 
in the arts, man catches the grand and lovely and pa- 
thetic in the heart. A popular infidel, finding fault 
with the idea of a God, says " He would have made 



CIVILIZATION. 65 



disease non-contagious and good health catching." 
Nature has been kinder than the infidel, for when man 
as a child begins to look at and admire the beautiful, 
of God, he at last catches in his own bosom that af- 
fection so mysterious and powerful. The morning 
song of the bird, the greatness of the sea, the color 
and perfume of the rose, the sighing of the night 
winds, are all contagious, and man having been near 
them becomes infected, and no years can ever sepa- 
rate his heart and brain from this magic in the blood. 
So infectious is this good health that all the beauty 
which is enjoyed by infidel or saint comes from 
touching the garments of Nature as she passes along 
in her royal purple. 

Could we pursue the inquiry further we should find 
that civilization is an uprising of man, not in some 
one quality, but in so many qualities that society 
passes from narrowness out into the breadth of the 
Almighty. That this breadth and fullness may be 
reached, there must be a liberty and equality of the 
people, so that the greatness of the epoch must not 
be sought in the few at a favored capital or metrop- 
olis. A barbarous state may show a few great minds, 
but civilization must be the condition of all, and hence 
can not exist except where there are liberty and 
equality. As all the depths of heaven mingle and 
compose its admirable blue so full of beauty and 
5 



66 



CIV/LIZA TION. 



peace; so all the throngs of our streets must be so re- 
formed and taught that they shall each be a part 
of that glow of soul called manhood — each be a part 
in the field of blue. All who in any manner help 
the people are servants of God, helping to lead that 
spirit of man which goeth upward gladly, leaving the 
lowlands of the brute. 

When music was young it began with the vibra- 
tion of a single string. That was sweet, but it was a 
monotony. Other strings were added as the ages 
came and went. At last the monotony was swal- 
lowed up in the rich flood of melody and harmony 
that came from the enlarged harp. Society once was 
only single-stringed. If it prayed it did not think ; 
if it thought it did not toil; if it took up labor it 
omitted liberty ; if it dreamed of liberty it forgot God. 
But as the generations sweep along, new tones chime 
into this music once so low and dull. The spirit of 
man will have climbed a hight far up toward the sky 
when God and all his laws having been found and 
obeyed, these shall in some strange way combine in 
the soul and sound forth music from a full harp. 



V. 
AN INWROUGHT LIFE. 



And this work of the candlestick was of beaten gold unto the shaft 
thereof; unto the flowers thereof was beaten work. — Num. viii : 4. 

One of the wonderful elements in the old Hebrew 
religion is that love of fine work which is seen in 
the temple service and tabernacle service, and in the 
buildings and equipments for the worship of the 
true God. The details are as rich as though the race 
of Hebrews had been reared in the times of Angelo 
or in the galleries and museums of our century. The 
part is very large which was played in that far-off 
time by colored curtains, by wires of gold wrought 
unto cloth, by badger skins dyed red, by engraved 
cups and basins, and by ornaments of beaten gold. 
It is quite certain that were the temple of Solomon 
now standing in its first or second splendor it would 
make insignificant some of the wonders of modern 
Europe. This deep love of elaborate carving and 
hewing and weaving and casting and polishing tells 
us not only the story of art among the ancient Israel- 
ites, but the story of the same sentiment among the 

(67) 



6 8 AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 

Egyptians. Canaan was a picture of Egypt. The 
child Moses going into exile left behind him the land 
of his mother, but not her features. His people in- 
deed borrowed jewels on the eve of their flight — 
jewels they never designed to restore; but the most 
valuable gems they stole must be found in the ideas 
and taste which they carried from the Nile to the 
Jordan. Those knops of flowers, those beautiful 
woven curtains, those basins with leaves carved on 
the margin and upheld by images of life did not come 
up from the desert or from the rocks, but came from 
the old and long industry and study of the kingdom of 
the pyramids ; thus hinting to us that the arts are 
the results of much labor on the part of many gener- 
ations. From this old scene along the Nile and 
afterward the Jordan, we must infer the conclusion 
that life to be worth the living must be wrought 
out carefully and patiently. Ideas and sentiments 
must be poured into it. It must be made of beaten 
gold; gold threads must be woven into its common 
fabric ; it must be dyed into a rich crimson or royal 
purple ; it must be hewed and carved and fully 
wrought out to the end. It is natural and easy to 
live, but it is difficult to live well. In the interior of 
the tropic lands existence is made easy by the pres- 
ence of fruits all the year, and by a climate which 
asks not for houses or clothing ; but here life is only 



AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 69 

existence. There is no beaten gold in it. It has no 
jewels either stolen or made. It is a most familiar 
truth, hidden for a long time, but known in all later 
years, that individual life is beaten out like gold 
wherever it is found in any form of its worth or 
beauty. One law holds true in all the visible parts 
of God's Kingdom, and that law is that all things, 
mind and matter, must be wrought upon until they 
shall show marks of labor. Some temple stones are 
left untouched with the hammer, and the taste is ap- 
proved because contrast is needed that the mind may 
possess the measurement found in comparison; as in 
music there may be some plain, dull passages, or 
even discord, that the heart may have a rest and feel 
the power of contrast afterward; but these unham- 
mered stones and this discordant music are not the law 
of the arts, only exceptions are they, intermissions, just 
as a wise man may divert himself at times by moments 
of clownish nonsense. The universal law is that of 
labor, and by no money or stratagem can we escape 
that statute of nature. There is a little chapel in 
Scotland which draws an army of visitors each sum- 
mer time, and its power of attraction lies in the 
quantity of thought and toil it embodies. It is carved 
on all sides ; its stone ceiling is carved, its columns 
are carved, and when the interior could admit of 
nothing more the affection that built it went outside 



7o 



AN INWROUGHT LIFE, 



and set up ornaments as long as place could be found 
for leaf or animal or saint. In the taste of to-day, 
when you find a house plain without, amende honora- 
ble is often made by ornamentation within ; as though 
builder and owner desired to confess somewhere that 
God and man ask of us some proof of labor. 

It was while dealing with this principle, Mr. Rus- 
kin, in the former generation, condemned the carving 
done by a machine and the rings and flourishes 
achieved by a turning-lathe. He affirmed that when 
a living hand had by months or years of toil carved 
you a table or a column the work stood for human 
patience and genius. The fondness of this genera- 
tion for this hand-carving and hand-painting prove to 
us that Mr. Ruskin uttered a truth in those essays 
composed thirty years ago. The machine-carving and 
the turning-lathe have been compelled to take a low 
seat at the feast of beauty, while pains-taking labor 
has been invited up higher. The candlestick of beaten 
gold, beaten in the shaft thereof and unto the flowers 
thereof is what the world demands now that it is 
summing up its observation and experience. The 
life of each of us is in the outset a plain piece of 
metal without figure or flower; it awaits the touch of 
the engraver, and often thus in waiting the years of 
life all hasten away and life ends as meaningless as it 
began. Our great business here is to add import to 



AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 7 £ 

our existence by marking it deeply with labor. It 
must show the blows of the hammer like the beaten 
silver and gold, not blows that break or bruise, but 
that give beautiful shape and leave evident traces of 
thought. Our world asks not for the labor that 
makes the shoulders stoop, that makes the body pre- 
maturely old and that breaks the heart, but it comes 
as far from demanding the perfect ease and leisure 
which some so deeply admire, for this idleness sur- 
passes excessive toil in the power to injure man. We 
are asked to accept of and love that labor that braces 
up all the nerves, that makes the heart beat strongly 
and that acts as a daily inspiration and, above all, the 
industry that has a purpose reaching into the future. 
It is probable that our age has its full share of 
aimless men and women. Evidently it is a better 
age than that of the classics who lived for physical 
perfection, and better than the barbarian times which 
lived for food and drink and sleep; but still we have 
a multitude large enough of persons who look at life 
through dull eyes — eyes w T hich Carlyle says seem 
made of horn. There is no brightness in them; no 
inspiration from the heaven of to-morrow. When 
these souls reveal any animation it is when they are 
awaiting the next excitement to come to them from 
without. The approach of the play or of the opera, or 
of a marriage in high life, makes these mortals put forth 



AN INWROUGHT LIFE, 



a smile or some little bud or leaf of the intellect; but 
there is no perpetual and great purpose within. We 
are all of us too much like the birds and fishes and 
animals in the great zoological gardens, asleep and 
stupid until the feeding hour comes ; then the restless- 
ness in each cage shows that some sensation is com- 
ing along from without. How are we much better 
than they ? 

The Creator's plan is not thus fulfilled. The soul 
of his child — man — was to be made all glorious 
within, it was to be so in-wrought that it would be 
able to find happiness in society and in solitude ; so 
awakened that when nothing shown in it could light 
up its own recesses and turn dens into palaces. God 
has not left you at the mercy of the outside pageant 
alone. He is willing that all that is external should 
help you, and that you should rush to the window 
or the door when a band of music is passing ; but, 
beyond doubt, the most of each year's joy was to 
come from the kind of mind and soul carried by each 
of you in these days of earthly sojourn. We can not 
all be such pure beaten-gold as was Mrs. Browning, 
but you can all see a law of man's nature in these 
words : 

" With stammering lips and insufficient sound 
I strive and struggle to deliver right 
The music of my nature day and night, 



AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 7 3 

With dream and thought and feeling inter-wound, 

And inly answering all the senses round 

With octaves of a mystic depth and height 

Which step out grandly to the infinite 

From the dark edges of the sensual ground ! 

This song of soul I struggle to outbear 

Through portals of the sense sublime and whole, 

And utter all myself into the air. 

But if I did it as the thunder-roll 

Breaks its own cloud my flesh would perish there 

Before that dread apocalypse of soul." 

In the immense external noise and movement of 
our country many a young person forgets the inner 
world of the mind, and instead of possessing a per- 
sonal character, becomes only a perpetual motion; 
and like rain-water will become stagnant if not 
stirred. The real truth is, it requires both worlds to 
make us live well ; the roar without and the capabili- 
ties within ; and then when the external dies for a 
week or a year, or for a few hours, the heart will be 
glad at the opportunity thus afforded of hearing what 
Mrs. Jameson calls " the octaves of mystic depth and 
height." Henry D. Thoreau, in hi$ strange life, an- 
swered two questions for us : Has the soul great un- 
known depths in itself? And is solitude the perfec- 
tion of bliss ? His experiment gave us " yes " to the 
former of these questions, " no " to the latter. Who- 
ever will read his writings will be amazed to find that 



74 AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 

a universe of joy and peace is stowed away in each 
one of the human race to whom there has come a 
fair mental development. We should all have sus- 
pected as much from what we have known of Socrates 
and Epictetus and other noble ones from antiquity. 
A bright catalogue of names now comes to memory 
of those whose joy came streaming out from their 
own spirits in the face of poverty and torment — a 
catalogue which assures us that the heart is to shine 
not with the reflected light as the moon, but like the 
sun by its own outpourings. Thoreau, the Socrates 
of our era, sets forth exquisitely what is really in 
each man; but just as clearly his experiment shows 
that each heart must dwell in society as well as in 
itself; for it is an eccentric logic that will ask me to 
love the song of the bird and the frog, and to despise 
the song of a Parepa or the orchestral music of Ger- 
many. The Creator who made the throat of birds 
made the song-power of Parepa, and the wisdom that 
made the chorus of toads or blackbirds ordained the 
orchestras of Europe and America. Not only the 
woods and fields are nature, but society is nature, 
and the notes of the violin are as much God's as are 
the colored leaves oi October. Thoreau was com- 
pelled to come back from the life of a hermit, and 
thus he revealed the utter failure of solitude; but he 
lived long enough in his cabin among the pines to 



AX IX WROUGHT LIFE. 



establish the fact that in each human spirit of fine 
natural powers there is lying quite a paradise of 
fruits and flowers. But this is the Eden that seems 
unknown to many of the young and of the old. 
They look out into the street all day long for their 
happiness. Some one says : " The traveller abroad 
finds only what he takes with him." And an old 
Latin said : " You do not get away from your soul 
by crossing the sea." We must have much within 
us before we can find much without. Therefore must 
we conclude that each individual is only a plain piece 
of metal, and that his noble career sets in when he 
has beaten his own gold into shape in the main and 
in the details. The candlestick of our text branched 
off so as to hold seven candles — seven being the per- 
fect number that could yield a perfect and emblematic 
light. It was beaten gold in the main shaft, and 
beaten gold in the seven branches and in the leaves. 
Thus when the human mind has become fully wrought 
out in its central powers and in the seven mystical 
branches thereof it will realize that life is w r orth the 
living. It will not be like the sun dial of the ancient 
which said, "I take no notice of days unless they be 
sunny;" but it will wear a nobler motto, "I am able 
to make the sun shine through clouds." 

Because of these inmost capabilities of man the 
education of the young should be general before it is 



j6 AN INWROUGHT LIFE, 

special. The one who is destined to be a mechanic 
or a clerk or a lawyer or an artist or a preacher or a 
pianist must also be a human being, and so moment- 
ous is this office of being human that education can 
not well bestow too much attention in that direction. 
The artist, the lawyer, the doctor, the book-keeper 
can not be occupied at all hours upon his pursuit; he 
is every night at least and much of each day set free 
to fall back upon his human self and he falls back 
upon a forlorn hope if his mind has no general educa- 
tion. Each one should have a kind double self— a 
self as a performer, a dealer in some shape of skill, 
and then a self as a human mind — a member of the 
immortals. Thus shall he have two paths of happi- 
ness — one for the working hours, one for all other 
days and years. The old question, " Why should a 
youth study branches he will not use in his business ?" 
is fully answered by the reply that one's business is 
only a part of one's world, one's soul is the other 
and larger part. There is no study of Latin or Greek 
or astronomy or botany or surveying or navigation 
that one will not use, for the man who buys wheat or 
lumber should turn into a human being at the close 
of business hours, and the lady who plays the piano 
should possess a grand human nature to return to at 
the end of her piece. 

In all the cities and large towns the question is 



AN INWROUGHT LIFE. 7; 

raised, " What shall we do to help the young men 
and all the homeless ones to pass well their even- 
ings ?" The Sunday evenings create a particular 
anxiety because many resources are cut off for that 
one night. The homeless youth in our cities are to 
be counted by thousands. How their evenings may 
be honorably and happily spent is one of the benevo- 
lent inquiries of a benevolent age. One reply comes 
in from all those who think : We must have open 
libraries, open art rooms, open and good churches, 
lectures, concerts, sociables, and on Sunday nights 
sacred concerts, or popular church services of song. 
This reply is full of wisdom and solicitude and love; 
but there is another answer that should be joined to 
this, and be taught to all youth everywhere always, 
namely — that the mind should not be dependent upon 
the things and scenes outside of itself. Children must 
be amused by an outside force; it requires the whole 
time of a nurse to keep the rattles and toy-wagons 
and the building blocks in successful operation, but 
we should all hasten away from such bondage to an- 
other mind, and should be happy *in the ability to 
shake our own rattle and put together our own build- 
ing blocks. Is it not time for all our young people 
to realize their own personal power and worth, and 
that when galleries and concerts and even church 
doors are closed or are wholly wanting, the soul is 



78 AN INWR UGHT LIFE. 

open and all lighted up and full of music or oratory 
and art ? We all need help from all. Nothing is so 
unendurable as solitude. When in the reign of ter- 
ror men were cast into dungeons, many of them of 
fine intellect went deranged from the awful pain of 
solitude ; others of them screamed at the bars to 
passers-by to help in some manner their tortured 
souls. The dependence of each upon the many is 
very real and beautiful ; but equally real and beauti- 
ful is the power of the mind to extract honey from 
some lonely hours, and that mind has wickedly neg- 
lected itself if it must each evening ask the outside 
world to supply it with entertainment. The desire 
to go somewhere each evening away from one's own 
fireside is simply a disease, as much so as the drunk- 
ard's longings for another cup. So broad was the 
intent and goodness of the Creator that man comes 
from His hand fitted for either the crowd or for the 
companionship of one or of only self. The city's 
roaring street and the path through the silent woods 
equally charm the developed mind. A walk of an 
hour along our lake shore in winter or summer in the 
evening, an hour with a good book, or an hour with 
a good friend by the winter evening fire, should be as 
full of earth's real blessedness as can be any gallery 
or drama or Bodleian Library. If any one can not 
find this good that one has missed one part of his 



AN INWROUGHT LIFE. 



destiny; he has been cheated out of half of his divine 
estate. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, 
when there were not half the spiritual riches in the 
world which now lie within the reach of the young, 
the poet Percy sang : 

M My mind to me a kingdom is, 
Such perfect joy therein I find 
As far exceeds all earthly bliss 

That God and nature hath assigned." 

Long, long ago the poet Drummond built his 
castle-home upon the crags in an unfrequented forest, 
ten miles from the royal Edinburgh, that days could 
come when he could sing his own song : 

" Thrice happy he who by some shady grove 

Far from the clamorous world doth live his own." 

Our cities must do all they can for the young gen- 
eration as it swarms up into the streets. Temptations 
many and powerful await these pliant hearts. Our 
money and toil should be poured out as a river of life 
to flow before their feet ; but these same young souls 
should learn and should rejoice to know that they 
have power within — a personal power w r hich can 
transform a small room into a world — a beautiful 
world that shall be all their own. " Their own mind 
a kingdom is." There is gold within that waits only 
the beating of the hammer, and forth it will come an 
ornament of matchless beauty. What a procession 
can you see of illustrious ones who have come up to 



80 AN INWR O UGHT LIFE. 

the highest usefulness and happiness simply by an 
unfolding of the divine in self! The pursuit of riches 
will not bring this triumph, for it is a chase after the 
external and is more wont to kill the spirit than give 
it life. It entices man away from the gold within to 
the coarser gold without. God having fashioned 
man, the infinite is not on the outside but it is within ; 
and all self-culture is a wearing away of the rough 
exterior to set free the diamond's transparent depths. 
A city may possess thousands of dens of vice, but 
thou needest them not. Thy destiny is along some 
other path. There are poisons enough in the shops 
of chemistry to kill all the millions of earth, but thou 
dost not, needest not take the poison. So amid the 
awful surroundings of vice you can live uninjured if 
only you will look inward and behold in yourself a 
mission once worthy of the Creator and now there- 
fore worthy of you. Our young comrades in this 
walk of life will ask little of the street and little of us 
older soldiers in the war when they shall have learned 
the grandeur of the personal kingdom bestowed upon 
each one by the heavenly Father; but lifted above 
temptation by a sublime estimate of existence each 
will say to his fellow : 

"Oh, mighty brother soul of man 

Where'er thou art, in low or high, 
Thy lofty arches with exulting span 
O'er-roof infinity." 



VI. 

A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 



From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted. — 
Eph. iv: 1 6. 

Symmetry is one of the elements of beauty in art. 
If the painter or sculptor or architect forgets this, it 
is vain he executes well the special parts of his work. 
If the arm of an infant is attached to the body of a 
man, or the large, heavy eye of a grave philosopher 
is painted in the face of a cherub, it is all vain that 
the arm or the eye in itself be excellent work. 
In a group of columns or figures it is easy for one to 
be too high or too low. In addition to the skill or 
genius demanded by each minute detail in art, the 
mind of the workman must possess breadth enough 
of intellect and taste to make him perceive the har- 
mony of things — the unity possible in the midst of 
diversity. No wonder some have begged of our 
artists and literary men and dramatists to give them 
the unities, for indeed in such harmony there is in- 
finite satisfaction, it is the soul's peace. 

Literature is equally bound to be on its guard, for 
6 (8 1) 



82 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

if the writer be not full of measurement and compari- 
son his introduction may promise more than is to be 
fufilled in the volume, or some character of little im- 
portance may play far more than its part in the circle 
of events, and the hero may be hidden behind the 
valet. The cathedral whose spire is to rise four hun- 
dred feet, must itself be colossal. Its foundations 
and arches in the crypt, and all the decorative 
columns must act in the outset as though a lofty spire 
or dome was to set up an eternal comparison of some 
kind between it and them. 

This law of symmetry, according to Paul, must be 
looked for in doctrines of belief and practice, and 
must help the finite mind in its search after and state- 
ment of truth. If man had to deal with but one 
doctrine in all his life, his danger of perverting it 
would at least be less visible even if not less real. 
His over-statement or his under-estimate would es- 
cape notice from self or society ; but the moment the 
mind must hold and arrange a score or more of dog- 
mas or ideas or laws, then his troubles begin ; and to 
find the best truth everywhere the theologian or states- 
man must be as skilful as Meissonnier, who, in his 
battle-scenes, never makes his horses too large for the 
riders, nor the soldiers in the background as distinct 
as those fighting or dying in the front. Before us the 
very leaves and grass and sprinkled blood are seen ; 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 83 

but in the distance the hills and trees with their green 
coverings and terrified beasts and birds, fade out of 
sight in smoke and dust. It is an embarrassment 
of our times that the public ideas have become so 
numerous in all the departments of thought and action 
that it is almost impossible to group them according 
to their merit ; that a small man may not be mistaken 
for a king, nor a good king mistaken for an ignorant 
domestic in this great canvas of thought or principle. 
When the human race began first to feel that there 
must be a God ; the one dogma of His existence lay 
before the multitude. The quality of that existence 
had not yet been thought out. The mind was free to 
imagine the Deity as awake or asleep, as full of re- 
venge or passion ; but as meditation and reason ad- 
vanced it became necessary to modify this existence, 
and finally conclude that the Creator never slumbers ; 
and then that He knows all and is present every- 
where. These last ideas would make improbable a 
material body and a local home, and thus the first 
thought must be modified by a second, and the second 
affected by a third, and thus onward'until at last the 
human race was called upon to weigh and balance 
opinions so as to make the arm respond to the size of 
the body; the foot to the limb, the eye and mouth to 
the face. When the Mosaic age arose up in the wil- 
derness and stood alone, for it would not see anything 



84 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE, 

else, neither Greece nor Asia nor the coming Rome, 
and saw the surrounding tribes only long enough to 
destroy them, it possessed an individual grandeur. 
Its hymns and laws were wonderful. Its customs, 
public and private, composed as it seemed a civiliza- 
tion ; but alas, for it ! when a new era suddenly ap- 
peared in the person of Christ then had Mosaism to 
be deeply modified. Those who had written its laws 
had not seen all the outlying world ; had seen only 
twelve tribes, had not seen the future of earth, only 
a narrow band of time ; had not seen the whole being 
of God; had seen him quite hidden in the cleft of a 
rock, or had heard the rustle of divine garments. 
Burning bush, thunder-shaken Sinai, the parting sea, 
the drowning of the Egyptian host had revealed the 
divine power, and it stood forth all gigantic, but no 
one had come yet to draw the outline of the divine 
love. Christ's advent was therefore an overthrow 
of the past: a sudden inquiry into the relative pro- 
portions of God's wrath and His mercy ; and John the 
Baptist told the whole story when he said, " He must 
increase but I must decrease." Emblems and local- 
isms had lived their natural life — a wider grasp asked 
for the retirement of much that had once been great. 
Doctrine, like learning, is always relative. Herodotus 
passed in his day for a historian, and Pliny for a dis- 
tinguished scientist, and Lycurgus was famous as a 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 



85 



statesman, but could those men reappear to-day in 
the exact condition of mind in which they left this 
world the one would not wear the glory of a histo- 
rian, nor the others the fame of science or political 
wisdom. Each would reveal traces of his special 
merit, but in the new era they would be unbalanced 
like trees which have grown for a hundred years with 
the sun on one side. It w T as therefore impossible for 
Augustine or Tutullian or Calvin or Luther to make 
final statements of doctrine, and impossible for the 
early popes and bishops to delineate a church that 
should be the one church of all the ages, for into 
their creeds or their church ideas would be cast not 
in any just proportion but with the partiality of the 
different times. If you will read any old creed of 
Roman or Protestant fabrication you will learn from it 
what doctrinal wars were then raging, and what dogma 
was the favorite or the horror of the times. As the 
old coats-of-mail assure us that bullets had not yet 
come, that the weapons must have been sword and 
spear and arrow, so the creeds of early epochs tell us 
that it was the delight of kings and popes and priests 
to have their enemies well punished, and that a God 
of vengeance was more desirable than a God of for- 
giveness and love. Had Dante written in our age he 
would have cut down and softened the " Inferno " and 
have carried his grand rhetoric and flowers and 



86 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

picture over into the purgatory and paradise, for the 
hell of our age is rapidly retreating into the purgatory 
of the past. 

Mr. Beecher recently expressed the wish that he 
might yet find a Christian philosophy which should 
be everywhere and always true and valuable. The 
wish is noble, for it is only a longing of the heart for 
a harmony that shall make many particulars blend 
like the instruments in an orchestra. We all may 
well long to see the figure of theology rise up like 
one of the graces from the chisel of Phidias or Thor- 
valdsen, and not longer to stand forth as monster — a 
cyclops with one eye in the forehead, or like the 
creature of Milton that 

" Seemed a woman to the waist and fair 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold 
Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed 
With mortal sting." 

There should be rising up from amid all the toiling 
artists to-day in the church, and in the closets of 
learning, and in the deeply thinking multitude, some 
form of Christianity which might reveal the lines of 
eternal beauty, and be to the realm of religious truth 
what the Apollo Belvedere is to the world of human 
forms. The generation now living asks for a Heaven- 
ly Father whose power and goodness, whose justice 
and mercy shall find some expression in the thoughts 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 87 

and language of earth. It seems evident that the 
wrath and mercy of God are vast facts, and from 
those facts must emerge two other facts called hell 
and heaven; but where is the supreme equity that 
shall tell us in what form we shall depict an angry 
Creator, or with what colors we shall paint the world 
of punishment and the world of happiness ? 

To illustrate the assertion that it is difficult for our 
generation to arrange into symmetry its great and 
sudden arrival of new thoughts, let us cite the doc- 
trine of benevolence or common charity. The last 
hundred years have been as busy in the theory and 
practice of love as were the dark ages in the invention 
and practice of cruelty. What military fame was to 
the Romans, or what physical beauty was to the 
Greeks, this sympathy for the common people is to 
our generation — a great dominant sentiment. And 
much nobler is it than any feeling which ever swept 
across the classic lands, for the wave of poetry or art 
or eloquence does not sparkle and smile like the 
bright waters of charity. Onward has come this 
sentiment like a spring-time hurrying up from the 
south. But suddenly the coins and food cast to beg- 
gars have to be withheld, for the charity which was 
supposed to save the poor only creates a new army of 
applicants. Benevolence has become a creator of 
idleness and wretchedness ; and back we are all driven 



88 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

again with our work of art, and are requested to make 
the arm harmonize with the body and the eye with 
the forehead, and to come back to the gallery with 
our work when we shall have gotten out of apprentice- 
ship and can tell an angel from a monster. All would 
have remained as it was had not the same age which 
has evolved the doctrine of charity wrought out at 
the same time new ideas and estimates of personal 
labor and independence. An age may find peace by 
knowing only a little, or else by knowing a vast num- 
ber of things. When our times began to ponder over 
the fact that Franklin was poor and yet needed no 
gift pennies, that Doctor Hogg was a coal-heaver, 
that Winckelmann was the son of a shoemaker, that 
George Stevenson began his career digging in the 
coal-pit, and expressed his joy when his pay was ad- 
vanced to twelve shillings a week, that Herschel 
played music for dancers and in the intervals studied 
astronomy, that Burns plowed, that Lincoln split rails, 
they began to find their charity to be affected by the 
rising glory of self-help. It has now come to this 
that w r e all stand between two large truths, that we must 
be kind to our neighbor, and that that is the wisest 
charity which teaches the mind to help itself. En- 
gland is now quite pervaded by the principle that 
man must be made to love his own self-support, and 
there are savings banks which do not suspend or 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 89 

break whose motto is, " To help the poor to help 
themselves. " Thus in a broad age doctrines come 
into conflict with each other, and the one first on the 
scene must often be much changed to make room, 
not for an antagonist, but for a companion. Difficult 
will it be to make the tree which has had the light 
and warmth on one side for a century straighten up 
its bent body and throw out branches on its feeble 
side. So our times affected by a long past, when all 
things tended to produce a onesided growth, will 
find a difficult task in the return to a symmetry of 
trunk and branch and leaf and fruit. Church and 
State will be in a temporary chaos like a doubting 
army, and the hearts of patriots will fear for their 
country and the religious fear for the safety of their 
altars. Good men and loving Christ are designated 
as infidels or skeptics, and the irreligious looking on 
laugh at man's faith in a God or a second life. But 
we have not come to a chaos, but to a luxuriant field 
where the soul is so rich that a score of ideas grow 
and become entangled together. To find the just 
value of each doctrine is one of the great labors that 
we must all help understand and perform. 

If you would attempt to measure yet further this 
entanglement of opinion you can find a field of oper- 
ation in the temperance question. The intoxicating 
cup met with a new and powerful foe in the temper- 



90 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 



ance reform which began early in this century and 
spread with great power in 1836 and adjoining years. 
The cheapness of whiskey made from the corn which 
grew everywhere made the distilleries more common 
than the school-house ; and sending thirty thousand 
men to the grave each year when the population of the 
nation was small, that popular drink won for the coun- 
try the fame in the words, "A Nation of Drunkards;" but 
here are we to day bewildered between the three ideas 
of total abstinence and moderation and personal lib- 
erty. Each idea is a large one. Abstinence stands 
upon a basis of logic ; so does temperance, and 
equally eloquent are the arguments in favor of per- 
sonal liberty. Where these three roads cross many 
good men have halted, not knowing fully what path 
to declare the wisest and best. But to our age alone 
have three such enigmas been proposed. To men in 
Bible times temperance was proposed and urged, but 
in those years individual right was of little significance, 
and of total abstinence little was said ; but here the 
three thoughts meet, and it is required of us to find 
the symmetry of the whole piece. I do not wish to 
be a drunkard, but desire to be free, and yet do not 
wish to set up my liberty against the welfare of my 
neighbor, and hence join the multitude which is in 
doubt where the roads cross. But it is lawful for us 
to surmise that the symmetry of these figures will 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 9 1 

at last be found in an education, intellectual and 
moral, which will make men ashamed to brutalize 
self by means of any of these drinks, distilled or fer- 
mented, known to our suffering race. It is proba- 
ble that "self-control" is to be the final and ideal 
watchword of our nation in this relation of society 
to a form of appetite. That is probably the method 
which will make a unity out of the figures to be 
gathered upon the canvas; for the grandest manhood 
and womanhood is that which can hurl back tempta- 
tion by a gigantic power within. All the great have 
become so not by a life in a sinless world but by 
life in a world whose vices they saw and despised. 
On one account the presence of a vice is a form of 
good fortune; it offers the noble soul an enemy to 
conquer and a proof that he has within some trace of 
excellence. Much of Paul's joy lay in his ability to 
say, "I have fought a good fight" — a sense of per- 
sonal worth he could not have reached in an angelic 
world. 

This difficulty of finding the proportion or equity 
of doctrine reaches outside of religion and beyond 
the questions of temperance and total abstinence. 
Let us look into another corner of this luxuriant age 
and note how vastly out of proportion has become the 
desire to amass riches. Industry and liberty and the 
unparalleled opportunities of the continent and men- 



X)2 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

tal growth are facts which meet in this land and 
period ; but the love of money has outgrown its noble 
companions, and once more the human nature is be- 
coming deformed. The passion for gain is tramp- 
ling to death, with many, the passion for learning and 
contentment and friendship and peace and goodness 
and usefulness. Young men turn back from schools 
or colleges that they may hasten to make fortunes ; 
books of literature are closed, conversation is aban- 
doned, home is postponed, marriage despised, reflec- 
tion and peace forgotten that all the powers of mind 
and body may be given to the race for riches. Thus 
falls or soon will fall the possible harmony of mankind. 
Thus will a new deformity begin to spread itself over 
that soul which came to earth in the likeness of God. 
Thus has the case been adequately stated. Is there 
any help for this disproportion ? There is indeed 
help, and that too within the reach of most hearts. 
Man cannot cure the diseases of the body. At last 
some fever or consumption or other illness will come 
and friends will say, " He must die." This is because 
nature has assigned us all to physical death. The 
free-will is not consulted ; hence before disease we are 
at last powerless ; but nature has not appointed any 
of you to spiritual disease and death. Rather it in- 
vites you to a higher and higher life. It has there- 
fore given you all a will-power that may evoke a 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 93 

beautiful world out of a chaos. What is a Franklin 
or a Washington or an Emerson or a Longfellow or a 
Lincoln or a Garfield except places where the human 
will has been with its creative touch. As one of the 
modern wise men said, "The universe is an enormous 
will rushing outward into life " ; so may we say of each 
noble man or woman, that is a human wish and pur- 
pose unfolding into the external flower of being. All 
ye young hearts who are just setting forth upon the 
journey can not indeed solve all the enigmas of 
thought, but looking out upon this magnificent land- 
scape you can say : " I shall worship a God of equal 
justice and love; He shall rise up before me holy, 
without spot and as loving as our mother ; His heaven 
and His hell shall be the arenas of a wise and a just 
Creator ; I shall throw Calvin and Luther and Ter- 
tullian and Augustine and thousands of other worthies 
into a new crucible, and shall extract the gold from 
each and from each the dross ; I shall open my heart 
in charity, but will remember the new-born propo- 
sition that he best befriends who helps a neighbor to 
help himself; I shall compare together the glass of 
spirits and the glass of crystal water and try to measure 
the sorrow and crime of the one, and the clear intel- 
lect and rosy cheeks in the other; and seeing the mad 
struggle for only money, I shall try to make a life of 
industry turn its earnings daily into more mental and 



94 A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 

spiritual power, and shall ask gold, not to make me 
a grasping monster, but to help me become a kinder 
and wiser man." Such a philosophy is not purely 
theoretic ; it is practical and simple and easy ; and in 
this kind of chariot many even in our age are riding 
happily along the earthly career ; and oftentimes like 
the chariot of Elijah it seems to leave the dust and 
noise of the discordant crowd, and to advance through 
the higher and sweeter air. 

This period, the widest and deepest of all in its in- 
tellectual grasp ; this period so overflowing with facts 
and thoughts and inquiries, so equipped with the love 
of labor and the instruments of labor, and so gener- 
ous in its rewards of toil, has dawned in vain to all 
the youth of our nation unless they draw near to it 
with that will-power which can compel the rich star- 
dust to gather itself into a world. He who simply 
gazes at the magnificent surroundings of modern 
existence is only a child which watches the bubbles 
blown into the air, full of delight at the prismatic colors 
of the frail, sinking and fading balls. They only are 
worthy children of God who seeing the statue in the 
marble block begin at once to bring forth arm and 
hand and cheek and forehead, until like the image made 
by Pygmalion the lips give signs of turning into 
speaking loving life. Up amid the disjecta membra 
of old ages and old worships arose the Christ of St. 



A SYMMETRICAL LIFE. 



95 



Paul. He debased some ideas and exalted others ; 
He made a new grouping of the figures which had 
come, some from Egypt, some from Israel, some from 
Asia, and when this divine master had refashioned 
and remade all, the religious mind gazed at the scene 
and beheld a new symmetry of things human and 
divine. God was in the midst, humanity were as 
children about his feet, virtue was receiving a crown, 
sin was sinking into the earth glad to conceal its form 
from a God and Savior so patient and merciful. 



VII. 

A. GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 



And Abram said unto Lot, * Let there be no strife I pray thee be- 
tween me and thee, and between my herdsmen and ihy herdsmen, for 
we be brethren. Is nor the whole land before thee ? Separate thy- 
self I pray thee from me; if thou wilt take the left hand then I will 
go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand then I will go to 
the left.' — Genesis xiii : 8. And we ought to lay down our lives for 
the brethren. — i John iii : 1 6. 

To us who live in what seems a golden age of 
thought and sentiment, it may well seem strange that 
an Abram who lived in dark times should have hap- 
pened upon such a noble idea as the one advanced in 
this text. Had the two groups of herdsmen with their 
patriarchs as leaders ambushed or openly attacked 
each other, and put to death each other, and each 
other's wives and children, and have scattered the 
herds in the wilderness, the story would have met 
better our expectation of such an age. Our estimate 
of the past is often incorrect. There were glorious 
things and ideas in all that remote antiquity. The 
jewels of history are not all to be found upon one 
shore. They are scattered along, so that each gen- 

(96) 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. gy 

eration may find its own pearl of great price. The 
reader as he passes along over the record in Genesis 
perceives the flash of this gold dust in the incident just 
read. Abram said, " Let there be no strife ; the world 
is broad. If you would prefer the right, I shall take 
the left, and if you prefer the left I shall take the right, 
for we be brethren." St John coming many centuries 
later and full of the spirit of Jesus Christ went beyond 
Abram and said, " We ought to lay down our lives 
for the brethren." If such a sentiment of mutual love 
and of compromise began to appear in the days of 
Abraham, and even then to be beautiful, what an im- 
mense life it should be living in these far off and, as 
we think, better days. The words " Let there be no 
strife. Is not the whole land before thee" and " we 
be brethren," should be loud and musical in our cen- 
tury. Let us think of them while we contemplate 
what should be and is becoming the greatest brother- 
hood on earth — the pulpit brotherhood. Your at- 
tention has often been called to the ministry as one of 
the learned professions and as a powerful department 
of thought and work, but not so often perhaps have 
any of us thought of the actual or possible brother- 
hood that pertains to that calling. It may be that 
the brotherhood idea has not been large enough to 
awaken any public admiration. It may be that the 
clergy have quarrelled and fought until the impression 



98 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

that its individuals are enemies has become more con- 
spicuous than the impression that they are friends. 
The worst qualities of anything are often the noisiest. 
If from any cause the world has failed to mark the 
fact of this Gospel guild, yet the fact remains. If we 
were unable to discuss it in the concrete, at least it 
should be viewed in the abstract, for if it does not 
exist it should soon be endowed with life and cheered 
onward toward a noble business. But such a broth- 
erhood exists. Its world is lying in outline and each 
year comes to clothe it with verdure and to awaken 
the hum of life. There is much discord still in the 
ranks. Individuals have their quarrels like so many 
children, but this is true of all earthly affairs and in- 
stitutes; they move along with much jarring and 
noise. And yet no clergyman can meet a member of 
his craft in any foreign land or in any journeyings, 
without feeling a little nearer to that man than to the 
general crowd of the street. One of the deeply ortho- 
dox clergy of a neighboring city found a near friend 
in a Catholic priest. Get these ministers well away 
from home where the little local interests are silenced 
by the larger and sweeter voice of the wide world 
and all the meaning falls away from " High Church " 
and "Wesleyan" and "Calvinist" and hands are 
grasped regardless of immersion or apostolic succes- 
sion. The mind and the heart and sometimes the 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 



99 



eyes fill up with the words of the old wanderer " We be 
brethren!' It used to be carved on the tombs of the 
early Christians " He sleeps in Jesus," " He rests in 
Jesus." This inscription blots out all other memory, 
and we know not whether the mortal thus remem- 
bered had been a carpenter or a farmer or a slave. 
He was wonderful in the one way in which he fell 
asleep or to rest. So on this side the tomb, clergymen 
meeting each other find all distinctions erased by the 
thought that he lives in Jesus or toils for Him. 

But let us leave the fact, which is as yet too weak, 
for the theory which is as yet too little studied. Let 
us approach the theory that the Christian Ministry is 
the greatest brotherhood among men. 

All professions are brotherhoods. Similarity of 
study and work and interest build up a sentiment 
that is much akin to a pure, deep friendship. States- 
men and scientists and lawyers know all about the 
pleasure that comes from this similarity of pursuit. 
When the telegraph brought to this city the news 
that its lady lawyer, Miss Hulett, had suddenly died, 
the resolutions of regret passed by her legal as- 
sociates were not simply formal, but were the ex- 
pression of esteem and love toward one who had 
passed over their long and difficult path of study, 
and had come earlier to her grave on account of toils 
and excitement which they only could measure. 



100 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

Through all professions runs this sympathy; but in 
the pursuit called the ministry, it should be more 
marked than along any other path of duty or occupa- 
tion. This profession contains the elements of a great 
brotherhood. 

It springs first of all from a contemplation of life 
on its pathetic side. The arts deal with intellectual 
and aesthetic ideas ; the statesman's guild rests upon 
political truths ; the scientific ties upon study of 
nature ; but the clerical association is sustained by 
the pathos of all human life ; it is fed by the sorrow, 
and faith, and hope, and fear, and mystery of man. 
All fellowship brings friendship, but when the fellow- 
ship is located among such facts as sin, and virtue, 
and sickness, and death, and Christ and God, and 
immortality, it ought to result in professional ties 
deeper than those which bind the travellers along any 
other path of action. In this pathos of human nature 
sprang up the sentiment which Abram expressed so 
grandly to Lot. Why should we fall into strife ? 
The ties of a common humanity bind us. We must 
journey along with our herdsmen and families and 
flocks toward old age and the grave, and hence let 
us journey peacefully, you turning to the right and I 
to the left, or thou to the left and I to the right. 
Such language did not spring from only a concep- 
tion of justice. The term, "We be brethren," turns 






A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 101 

us away from exact justice, and asks us to admit an 
element of the truly pathetic. Those two migrating 
hosts parted not at the bidding of right only, but by 
command of a sentiment of humanity. One of 
those higher emotions which sometimes strike the 
heart as a perfumed wind, sometimes sweep North- 
ward from spicy islands, arose in the bosom of Abram, 
and it suddenly took the point off of every spear and 
transformed the wild herdsmen into children. Already 
doubtless the spirit of God had begun to attack the 
soul of the exile. He had just encamped at a place 
called Bethel and had there called upon the name of 
the Lord. The future which was to change the name 
Abram into Abraham, and was to crown him the 
leader of the faithful, had already begun to germinate 
in his heart. Out of this dawning religiousness 
sprang the sentiment, " Let there be no strife, for we 
be brethren. " The city of foundation had begun to 
unveil itself. 

Beneath the human race there has generally been 
some one shape of thought and sentiment at which 
distinctions have ceased and men have become broth- 
ers. Literature and the arts have often been this 
common ground where all feet, of king, or slave, 
might stand. It may be that these arts and letters 
were called the "humanities" from the fact that they 
belonged not to a class, but to the human race, and 



102 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

because they built up in the soul not a feeling of 
caste, but one of humanity. The slave ^Esop found 
his fables an introduction to the presence of kings, 
and the slave Epictetus was made one with the high- 
est princes by the height and depth of his philosophy 
about God and the soul. It may be that all literature 
and art gradually acquired that name, the humanities, 
not only because they humanize, but because they are 
a common ground where distinctions cease and slave 
and king are equal parts of the human quantity. At 
least beneath the stream of life there is some common 
ground which each foot may touch. The ministry of 
religion has such a universal good or potency in that 
pathos which creates it and inspires it. Abram, 
Enoch, Job, Daniel, Plato, Epictetus seem to us now 
strangely bound together by the oneness and great- 
ness of their inquiry; and then after Christ a still 
more impressive oneness appears reaching along over 
the many centuries. But so greatly has this brother- 
hood been interfered with by personal and sectarian 
interests that we shall much better employ the words 
"should be" than the words "has been." With a wide 
and powerful sentiment flowing through the midst of 
it what a brotherhood should we find in the Christian 
ministry ! When Mr. Beecher was making his brief 
sojourn in this city he said, in a private conversation, 
that often when he " lay on his pillow, or was gliding 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 1 03 

along in a rail-car, half-asleep, there came into his 
mind an upper view of religion, above the region of 
cloud, where all creeds became one, and all the dis- 
cords of the many systems gave place to a harmony. 
When the poor body had fallen half-asleep, the soul 
would steal away from it and fly up higher, whither 
no discord could follow. The body being fully 
awakened again by the fatal morning clock, or by the 
jolting car, back came the religion of the low valley 
again with its contradictions and petty interests." 
How true was that monologue ! There is a harmony 
of Christianity positive and beautiful. But the local 
interests, those things of the flesh, must be lulled to 
sleep before the heart can rise into the upper air 
where doctrines change into one grand truth, and the 
servants at the altar are transformed into brethren. 
But it is an inspiration to know that there is a Tabor 
where this wonderful transfiguration may take 
place ; for knowing of its existence we can always 
seek for it in all this pilgrimage, and when sight 
is denied, be almost transformed by the hope. 

Let us mark the rational grounds for expecting and 
declaring such a brotherhood. One has been men- 
tioned, the common element of pathos that runs like 
a thread of gold through religion. Now to this com- 
mon sentiment of all religion, natural or revealed, add 
the one central character or idea of Christianity — its 



1 04 A GREA T BRO THE R HO OD, 

Jesus Christ. This one idea is so powerful that it 
ought to bind all the gospel ministers into one friend- 
ship, of which the words of Abram, " we be brethren/' 
could be but a faint shadow. It ought not to be pos- 
sible for any two migrating patriarchs, moving their 
flocks about from pasture to pasture, while civilization 
was young, and the air dark, to happen upon a fel- 
lowship that could shame any of the relations that 
should spring up among Christians living in the dis- 
pensation of Christ. All the ideas of unity held 
by old Abram and Lot should fade in attractiveness 
before that unity of hearts which should spring from 
the idea of Jesus. According to writers in art, unity 
is the perpetual presence of one idea. It is seen 
everywhere on the canvas. If the picture be that of 
11 Rispah Protecting the Bodies of Her Sons," though 
there be a hundred details in the composition, each 
one will tell the sorrow of the mother. On account 
of her desolation the seven bodies will hang without 
raiment. She will stand upon a garment of sackcloth. 
The rocks around will not mock her with any lichen 
or moss. The heavens above will have no sunlight 
or star. The forests will be dark, and the birds of 
prey black. The mother's hair will hang uncombed, 
and her robe unbound to show that her heart is far 
away from her black tresses and her vesture. 
■Columns of cloud and smoke will be seen afar as 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 105 

though the universe were a sharer in her wild grief. 
This is what art-lovers call the unity of variety. Now 
what these cultivated minds ask of art and find on all 
great canvases is to be found in almost sublime pro- 
portions in the Christian religion, for there hangs 
Christ upon a rude beam defending by His death His 
children from sin and suffering. This one fact should 
rush forth and change into its likeness all the details 
near and far. The Catholic and Protestant, the holder 
of this idea and of that should all be drawn into one 
circle and made equal parts of the one impressive 
picture. No discord should run through the scene, 
but from face of Calvinist, and Methodist, and Roman- 
ist should beam the sorrow and the joy, the work, the 
hope of Jesus Christ. The central Christ should im- 
press all the surrounding scene into his service, and 
group a hundred sects into one picture. 

As though this unity of the central figure were not 
enough to bind the ministry into accord, there comes 
a unity of result to unite once more to a close broth- 
erhood. The work of the ministry is one — another 
unity amid variety. Not only is this a theoretic unity, 
that of leading mankind to the spirit of Christ, but 
it is an actual unity, for here, all through this land, 
after a winter of religious work, all the reapers come 
in from the fields, bringing their sheaves with them. 
These sheaves are equal in number and of the same 



106 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

kind of grain. Some instructive lessons could be 
learned from the reports which the churches are 
making of winter work. Churches planted in the 
midst of one population draw equally from the world, 
and Methodist, and Baptist, and Presbyterian, and 
Episcopal, and Congregational folds find God equally 
near. Looking down from the higher heavens, the 
Spirit sees not the distinctions which we think so 
large and see so plainly, but God sees only the unity 
of the hearts that love Christ, and for each one who 
finds conversion in a Presbyterian sanctuary some one 
bows to be confirmed at an Episcopal altar. By many 
paths the sinful children press forward to one salva- 
tion. Hence, viewed in the light of results, there is a 
brotherhood in this army that follows after that Naz- 
arene Chief. This oneness of result should turn into 
an inspiration that might bear the clergy along to- 
ward the divine words, " We be brethren." Not only 
the oneness but also the greatness of the result should 
compel a marked fraternization. It is said that the 
large modern Society of Freemasons sprang from the 
bodies of temple-builders, which in the days of pal- 
aces and cathedrals went from place to place in the 
old world, and encamped around their future struct- 
ure. From daily association and similarity of pur- 
suits a great friendship sprang up and gathered all 
these toilers in its arms. This friendship blossomed 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. \oj 

into processions, and regalia, and festal days, and 
then by-laws, and then secret words, by which the 
Mason would know and be known in a strange 
land. And yet the one idea, the unity out of which 
came such a variety, was only the temple or the 
palace that arose amid all these united hands. Here 
was only a beautiful purpose. But the Christian 
order does not join hands about a fabric of marble, 
an acropolis, or a basilica, but around a Christ and a 
temple of virtue and immortality. Here is not only 
a oneness of result, but a sublimity of result — a temple 
of the soul. The brotherhood of Masonry should be 
outdone. Moving about the world in the name of 
this one Christ and this temple of righteousness, there 
should spring up a brotherhood which could never be 
furnished the world by any other union of hands and 
hearts. A language should spring up which might 
make friends for any Christian wanderer in any land. 
Indeed, it is related of some dying man on a battle- 
field, or in a hospital, that when a humane visitor 
came to this sinking one and began to speak to him 
in a foreign language, the sufferer, not understanding 
a single sentence, smiled and grew happy whenever 
the strange speaker came to the word, Christ. That 
one word showed the fellowship of the two souls. 
Differing in language and condition, the visitor and 
the dying were one in Jesus Christ. Toiling about 



108 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

one temple, and that temple being Christ and his re- 
generation, there belongs to the Christian ministry a 
brotherhood of unrivaled quality. 

But we are not yet done with the theoretic unity 
of this profession. Not only does a humane philoso- 
phy coming down from Abram in Mamre impel 
toward such an affectionate association, not only does 
the unity of result seen in our times declare the folly 
of fraternal strife and the obligations of companion- 
ship but the mighty future of earth and of eternity 
whisper to us all of an equality and oneness of which 
few have yet reached the faintest dream. Advancing 
civilization is casting aside small ideas, is separating the 
incidental from the essential and is making uo a broth- 
erhood day by day as each spring-time enlarges the 
oak, but just beyond this powerful civilization lies the 
tomb which will unstring the discordant harps of 
earth and re-make them for music. Out of the grave 
men will not emerge Catholics or Protestants, Method- 
ists, Calvinists, but children of God. So well assured 
are we of this that now over some of the grand tombs 
of earth, such as those of Fenelon and Robert Hall 
and Pascal, one seldom remembers to what sect each 
occupant belonged, because the silent grave has ter- 
minated those qualities and has made them pass into 
history as they passed into heaven, only sons of God. 
The grave is the final exposure of all the large and 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 109 

little cheats of this life. It lies in the ground a judg- 
ment bar where the littleness of man is ordered into 
eternal dust and the greatness of man is welcomed to 
heaven. Perhaps man is compelled to march toward 
a sepulchre that its nearness and inevitable coming 
may help humiliate the heart into a fraternal love 
which could never come from a proud life unchecked 
by such a sad boundary. Thus before the ministry 
there sprang up in the old time the words " We be 
brethren," that ought to be potent in yielding mutual 
love; then came the sublime oneness of idea and 
work in Christ, and then came the levelling influence 
of the portal of eternity, that iron gate. Standing 
amid such facts and ideas it should not surprise us 
but it should profoundly impress us to see the cler- 
gymen of our own East communing at each others' 
altars and the loftiest genius of the Episcopal church 
helping an unlettered evangelist to carry blessings to 
the multitude. The rubrics are good. Many an 
army of souls has read itself into heaven over 
the prayer-books of the Episcopal church ; and so 
education and learning are a valuable possession, but 
the uprising of religious longings and intentions is 
better than all, and hence the varieties of man give 
way to make room for the unity of God. It is a 
token of a better day when, all the world over, the 
clergy of the groined-ceilings and velveted desks can 



HO A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. 

join with unordained evangelists in a board meeting- 
house or canvas-tent in offering to the multitude the 
one Savior. 

Doubtless many different forms of doctrine must 
remain. Unity is not identity, but sympathy. Abram 
and Lot held a unity in diversity, a diversity of path, 
a unity of love. Thus before the Gospel ministry lies 
the world. The Presbyterian looks out and sees a 
plain of Jordan, that it is well watered. everywhere, and 
thither he turns with family and flock, while the 
Episcopalian finds Canaan charming enough for him, 
and into its vale of milk and honey he leads his host ; 
but as the caravans file away from each other the 
Eastern air seems redolent with friendship, and the 
breezes seem to murmur through the palm trees the 
words, " We be brethren. " 

Of course not yet has the golden age come. Dis- 
cordant notes will be heard in all music. In all mov- 
ing armies there are weak hearts that long to turn 
back and give up the fatherland or the liberty. There 
will always be minds which will find more in a word 
than they can find in the Savior, and who for an acre 
more of ground, or for a half dozen more of 
palm trees would have drenched with blood those 
plains where Abram found such a compromise with 
man, and such a Bethel of God. But these seekers 
of discord grow fewer and fewer as the generations 



A GREAT BROTHERHOOD. \\\ 

pass, and all things indicate that the delicate harmony 
of Abram will in coming times swell up into a chorus. 

Furthermore, it is not necessary that all men should 
confess and see plainly this brotherhood of the clergy. 
If some are happy without marking such a spectacle 
they need not exult over the oneness of the servants 
of Christ. A truth may be on hand or be coming 
without being universally known. An exiled king 
once returned to his palace after long absence and 
was confessed only as a beggar, and was fed and 
neglected as such. But his rags in due time gave 
place to royal robes. Along come great truths un- 
known, unheralded for a time, but at last the tattered 
garments fall away and the whole mountain is full of 
light and transfiguration. 

The practical lessons for the people and the pastor 
who meet here each Sunday are simple and true. 
There is a Church to which we all belong. It has 
that central idea, Christ, which is the unity of every 
denomination. It matters little what variety is thrown 
upon the canvas around that central figure. Is not 
the whole land before the ministry ? and if our breth- 
ren select the one hand where the fields reach out to 
their eye like a garden of the Lord, and thither we 
can not also go, then to us remains the other hand, 
and to us it will seem beautiful as Egypt, as thou 
comest unto Zoar. Over to the other army we cry 



112 A GREAT BROTHERHOOD, 

out " We be brethren." At times the unhappy men 
who cannot see the brotherhood of the clergy or of 
Christians will inquire whether you and I have the 
true faith ; but this inquiry, come as it may, will only 
remind us how wide the land is before all the wan- 
dering ones in the field of thought, and that to the 
right or left, God and Christ are equally near. Nearly 
all the fine distinctions about what is called ortho- 
doxy are only the quarrels of the herdsmen in the renr 
of the army and are not the voice of the Abram who 
has found a Bethel in the front. The land lies before 
you inviting and broad. In the midst of such a vast 
encampment we need not be lonely. If we do not 
belong to one denomination, then, what is better, we 
can belong to all. And we need not ask man to 
admit us, for man has the keys of only his small 
sanctuary and could admit only to one little room. 
By casting ourselves in love and obedience at the feet 
of Christ we join all the Churches by finding the 
unity of the variation — the gate that opens into every 
sanctuary. 



VIII. 

THE BETTER CHOICE. 



u The tree of knowledge of good and of evil." — Gen. ii : 9; xvi: 17. 

When Thomas a'Kempis was a youth of about 
twenty years, he visited a great man of that day to 
learn of him what path such a youth should follow 
through life. In that era of church history there 
were but few roads along which an educated mind 
could journey. Theological lore (if errors gathered 
into volumes can be called lore) had displaced law 
and medicine and science and politics as human pur- 
suits, and had displaced literature except so far as it 
related to abstruse questions and the wonderful lives 
of the saints. To this young inquirer after duty the 
old man had ready the only advice which seemed 
great in that dark age, " Enter a convent and study 
the deep things of God." The youth obeyed and 
gave to solitude seventy years of this earthly time. 
The scene is greatly changed now and each one 
stands, in the morning of his existence, where many 
ways diverge. The world has become richer in pur- 
8 (113) 



1 14 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

suits and pleasures than it was when monasteries and 
convents and caves and lonely forests drew many 
thousands of gifted ones into the supposed purity and 
safety of solitude. Then education fled from the 
world and was thus a constant robbery of a gorgeous 
temple ; now education adds to the world and instead 
of being a destroyer is a creator of good. Talents 
and learning and ambition may well become bewil- 
dered in a country which invites toward more than a 
hundred avocations. The monasteries have been 
generally closed; the solemn woods are disturbed by 
the lumberman's axe and the flying train, and even 
the philosophies, religious or abstract, have come out 
of the closet in order to adapt themselves to the 
highest interests of mankind. It is much to the 
credit of modern philosophy that whether it is incul- 
cated by Stuart Mill or Harriet Martineau or Herbert 
Spencer, it seeks the immediate welfare of the multi- 
tude. Nothing is purely abstract any longer. All 
pursuits, intellectual or physical, seek one end : the 
betterment of the human race — a goal sought by all 
the thought of the century. 

Mention is made here only of honorable callings ; 
and this remark brings us to the sad fact that man's 
ingenuity has not confined itself to paths of noble 
industry of mind and body. After having enumerated 
a hundred honorable callings that may lead to health 



THE BE TTER CHOICE. \ i 5 

and money and morals and happiness, we must find 
at last that there are two great highways that absorb 
all others into themselves. As many streams are 
received and are combined into one Nile and one 
Mississippi, so the avocations of men are attracted 
into two great channels : the right and the wrong. 
These are the paths whose flowers and thorns are of 
most pressing consequence. These sprang up when 
primitive man, in some far-away epoch, came upon 
the knowledge of good and evil. The story is that 
there was a tree once growing of which if a moral 
being ate, that being w r ould at once know that the 
good was not all of life ; that, also, there was an 
attainable evil, and with this knowledge would come 
the feeling that the forbidden were better than the 
permitted. Though the origin of evil may thus come 
to us clothed in fable, the advent of evil itself is no 
fable. It appeared and became one of the paths for 
human foot to tread. Among the flowers and fallen 
leaves of Eden it must have been only a dim trace 
once, the lonely foot-prints of a flying Cain ; but by 
degrees it became a definite trail like those made by 
Indians in the early woods of our America. This 
trail was slowly enlarged until it became a broad 
highway along which great multitudes marched to 
their varying fates. These are to-day the two great 
avenues that sweep across our earth; so mighty, so 



Il6 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

happy or so miserable that they eclipse those 
pursuits which we call "law" or " medicine " or 
" literature " or " trade." 

Our earth is amazing in its two-fold ability to pro- 
duce pleasure or pain — nobleness or degradation. 
Its dual nature is innate and endless. Its ocean is as 
able to destroy as to delight, and as many have writ- 
ten about its fury as about its beauty and sweetness 
and health. Three thousand vessels were lost upon 
it in the last twelve months. From the days of the 
Psalms to the last hour of any modern day it has 
been the joy and terror of our race, and having been 
praised in song and music it passes into church serv- 
ice and forms a prayer for those who go down into 
the sea in ships. So the rains which help create the 
vegetable world swell into floods that bring ruin ; 
and the winds that are welcome zephyrs to-day, are 
tornadoes to-morrow. The frost of winter and the 
heat of summer will destroy. The lightning which 
purifies the air is an angel of death to some, and the 
nights full of stars and of poetic charm are often as 
full of the invisible seeds of disease. Poisons are 
hidden in plants; the soil which grew the wheat of 
Athens grew the hemlock of Socrates, and which 
made the wheaten cakes of the patriarchs made also 
the wines which intoxicated their brains and brought 
their names to dishonor. 



THE BETTER CHOICE. 117 

Thus our earth reveals to us a dual nature as 
though ready for either a human career of happiness 
or wretchedness. The picture thus shown us by the 
sea and the land is repeated in the history of man. 
His virtues can all become vices. A power of 
righteous indignation can become a violent temper 
and make a madman or a common scold of a heart 
that began by longing to correct abuses; the senti- 
ment of love, which is the glory of the home, can be- 
come a laughable weakness or a dangerous vice ; the 
love of food may end in gluttony; the love of drink 
in drunkenness ; the love of gold may make a tyrant 
or a miser ; self-love may expand into egotism and 
repose into indolence, and religion itself into fanati- 
cism. Thus our world, physical and moral, stands 
ready for either goodness or badness, the great or 
the small, the noble or the mean, the spiritual or the 
sensual, for life or for death. Its two-fold quality is 
more conspicuous than its mountains, as enduring as 
its sun and moon and stars. Between these two 
objects man as an individual or as expressed in 
nations stands, and is compelled to make a choice. 
He may decline the large group of industries and live 
on an inheritance, or may beg food like an old monk, 
but he cannot decline both of these highways of right 
and wrong. He must select and move on, and in 



1 1 8 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

this fact lies the success of some, and of others the 
perpetual shame. 

As long ago as when Horace lived, this frailty of 
the heart had become notorious : 

" I know the right and I approve it, too ; 

I know the wrong and yet the wrong pursue." 

The disposition of many to make a wretched choice 
had become conspicuous in that far-off period- — a dis- 
position gratified so often and by so many that our 
world is now not a comedy, but a tragedy of errors. 
It has blundered and blundered until we may well be 
amazed that the race did not die long centuries ago 
by its own hand. It is a wonder we have not had 
the suicide of a race. Indeed vices have perhaps 
destroyed not a few savage tribes, and have perhaps 
compelled the old nations to decline from glory into 
decay and almost oblivion. But in all times a few 
have chosen the better path and have held up with 
noble hands the banner of a divine humanity. 

Glance briefly at some of the blunders of mankind. 
War claims a very conspicuous place. Who can 
ever measure the absurdity and cruelty and crime of 
war ? Under such leaders as Xerxes and Alexander 
and Caesar and Napoleon, human groans and tears 
and blood were not counted or measured. A million 
men died at the command of Xerxes, a million men 
died at the command of Caesar, a million at the bid- 



THE BETTER CHOICE. 



II 9 



ding of Napoleon. Such books as that one called 
" The Shadow of the Sword," and those called " The 
Conscript " and " Waterloo," are the merest hints at 
a sorrow as long and as wide as human life. This 
killing of men has always been an atrocity. It has 
taken place in a world where the right path led 
toward free commerce, free ships, equal rights, and a 
universal brotherhood. A path all adorned with 
flowers and cheered by the song of birds and the 
gloria of men was all the while lying upon the hills 
and fields and over the mountains, but the human eye 
would not see it, but it saw quicker and longer the 
path of innocent blood. War has been the perpetual 
delight of all the ages except the one now passing 
more peacefully along. And yet such is the eagerness 
for the field of blood that a humane statesman of Eng- 
land was recently compelled to say that only one 
honorable battlefield could be found in our century — 
the one on which the United States defended their 
national existence. Upon the Waterloos and Sol- 
ferinos and Crimeas must rest always the stain of a 
deep wrong. 

" No blood-stained victory in story bright 
Can yield the philosophic mind delight; 
Nor triumph please; while rage and death destroy, 
Reflection sickens at such monstrous joy." 



120 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

Mrs. Browning sang : 

" The battle hurtles on the plains ; 

Earth feels new scythes upon her, 
We reap our brothers for the wains 
And call the harvest — honor! " 

And yet there is a blunder of our race more cruel 
than that of the sword. It is rendered less impressive 
from the fact that it has been lectured upon and 
wrangled over in all parts of the land, and has often 
been rendered an unwelcome theme of remark by the 
quantity of ill-advised speech and action that have 
grown up around it. But notwithstanding the un- 
popularity of temperance lectures the truth stands 
that when the human mind learned to distil and brew 
drinks it committed a greater folly than when it in- 
vented the weapons of war. The cup is more de- 
structive than cannon and musket, not only carrying 
more persons to the grave, but to a life and death of a 
greater dishonor, for the poets have always sung 
some sweet strains over the last resting place of the 
soldier; but no poet has ever had the courage to cast 
any flowers upon a drunkard's grave. The dual qual- 
ity of the very soil is illustrated in these fatal drinks 
of the human race. The grains which will make the 
bread for the table of the home will also help com- 
pose a drink fully capable of scattering forever those 
wont to meet at the table in a supreme contentment. 



THE BETTER CHOICE. 12 1 

Not only were Adam and Eve ready to fall into sin, 
but the field of corn or wheat stands ready to become 
a harvest of vice. Strange earth ! equally ready to 
grow the opium that kills, or the fruits and breads 
that enrich and cheer the mind ; equally ready to 
produce drinks that will crush the heart, or the food 
that makes men great and happy ! In the far east, 
where thousands of acres of roses are grown for the 
joy of their perfumes, there as many acres of poppies 
are grown for the delirium and ruin of the multitude. 
Mark the two fields : the one of roses from which the 
attar is extracted that fragrance may be carried over 
the world and that the noblest of all flowers may seem 
to bloom in the midst of winter — in the room where 
the cultivated mind reads or talks or sleeps. As the 
note-book holds the music of Beethoven, as language 
retains the genius of Homer or Virgil, so this attar 
holds the spirits of roses that are dead. A true per- 
fume is the immortality of the rose. When the eye 
sees many thousands of acres of these flowers grow- 
ing thus to honor, it blesses the hidden mystery of 
sun and soil and the genius of man ; but when the 
same heart beholds the same human mind planting 
ten thousand acres of poison-plants which will ex- 
tract money from the Chinese or other victims of 
folly, then does it realize that there are two paths 
across this world — a path of right and a path of in- 



122 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

finite wrong. As the Orient yields thus its two 
harvests, one of rich perfumes and one of the opiate 
poisons, so the vast West grows the grains that create 
a powerful race and the drinks that hasten to destroy 
it. When Xenophon was writing down the customs 
of some wild tribes, through which he had to make 
his long march, he stated that " in the mountains of 
Armenia the natives made a popular drink from fer- 
mented barley. In their homes under the ground 
this drink was contained in large vessels, and when 
one would drink he must put his mouth to a reed and 
suck like an ox. Without any admixture of water it 
seemed harsh, but was good to any one who was ac- 
customed to its taste." In these words we find the 
common beer of to-day, and see that twenty-four 
hundred years ago it was getting ready for an invasion 
of Germany to trample it under foot more cruelly 
than did the armies of Csesar. Pliny describes also 
the coming enemy in these words : " The natives 
who inhabit the west of Europe made a drink from 
grain and water with which they intoxicated them- 
selves. The people of Spain so brew this liquor that 
it will keep good a long time " ; and then Pliny adds 
these words of great meaning : '* So exquisite is the 
cunning of mankind in gratifying their vicious appe- 
tites that they have thus invented a method to cause 
water itself to produce intoxication." Thus we see a 



THE BETTER CHOICE. 123 

Roman scientist noting the fact that the human mind 
was as cunning to invent evil as to invent good, and 
that the genius that can discover the telegraph and the 
properties of steam, and thus help make civilization, 
can discover opium and whiskey and beer, and thus 
be a Medea who can at once be the mother and the 
murderer of her sons. This path of private and pub- 
lic wrong has so broadened that the German nation 
has abundant company in these years in the English 
and Americans who have accepted of the genius that 
can make water into a poison. 

When one cannot advocate total abstinence as a 
duty, and may admit that man may seek some pleas- 
ure in his drink as he seeks some in his food, and 
need not any more always drink water than he need 
always eat only bread and meat, yet such is not the 
kind of delicate treatment the millions bestow upon 
drinks. They brutalize self and quickly become 
slaves of their dram, and all else fades away to leave 
time and money for the destructive cup. England 
alone manufactures twenty-five millions (25,000,000) 
of barrels of beer annually, of which only one-fiftieth 
part is exported. Thus the money value of twenty- 
four million barrels of malt drinks is flung away by 
the people, rich and poor, high and low, in the islands 
of the Queen. Add the liquor traffic of our nation 
to these figures and we have an awful illustration of 



124 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

the folly of man, of his fitness to be either a philoso- 
pher or a fool, his fitness to weave for his children 
garments of happiness or of sorrow. 

The so-called German unity upon the beer ques- 
tion should fall to pieces in this enlightened century. 
What they should do at the polls may be uncertain, 
but that the rising generation of Germans should 
detach themselves from the saloons is one of the most 
evident of all the ways of duty. That national drink 
is rapidly injuring one of the best races our earth ever 
had. The Scalpel a few years ago published an ar- 
ticle which went to show that this drink was chang- 
ing the form and faces of German men and women ; 
was making the flesh of the face so nerveless that it 
sunk with its own weight, and eyelids and cheek and 
the mouth were drooping down, making deformity of 
face common among men and beauty rare among 
women. To this havoc made in the physical form, 
add the perversion of mind and money along bad 
channels and you will have reason enough for lament- 
ing the drift and probable destiny of the German 
youth. So powerful was their race in mind and body 
that it dies hard, but intemperance is a conqueror at 
last of all provinces he invades, and if the " German 
unity " of drink goes on the rising generations will 
find the unity of drink to be one also of German 
misfortune. The American German must pause in 



THE BETTER CHOICE. 1 25 

their career and confess the " saloon " and the 
"garden" to be no longer their happiness but their 
calamity. 

In a world where two such paths as those of right 
and wrong are sweeping along — one joyous and the 
other gloomy— it is not to be wondered at that all 
holy books and all holy men have been compelled to 
see a heaven and a hell toward which these paths 
lead. The duality of earth and of man declare a 
duality of destiny. If a mighty stream runs north we 
say there must be a North Sea into which it at last 
discharges its flood, and if we then find a large river 
running southward we feel that it must know of a 
Southern Ocean large enough to receive its floods 
from age to age ; thus standing by these two paths 
and marking them diverge, we are compelled to con- 
fess that these ways lead to two different countries 
on this side and the other side of the grave. Logic 
and observation teach us that hell and heaven begin 
here. They are nothing else than the outworkings 
of man's own choice. A hot iron taken in the hand 
burns now and here, and so the path of folly hastens 
to offer its thorns. What more and bitterer tears 
there may be beyond this life is not known, but in 
this world you will not follow the wrong road far 
before the feet will bleed. From the very outset the 
ways are different, in the foliage on either side and in 



126 THE BETTER CHOICE. 

the stones under foot and in the sky over head. 
Addison Alexander, in his form of Calvinistic fatal- 
ism, composed this hymn : 

" There is a time we know not when, 
A point we know not where, 
That marks the destiny of men 
For glory or despair;" 

in which lines there may be a solemn truth, but 
nature is so free from all mystery in her laws of right 
and wrong that the hymn would perhaps better be 
separated from all enigma and made to thunder forth 
the choice of each adult mind : 

" There is a time you know just when, 
A point you know just where, 
That marks the destiny of men 
For glory or despair " — 

all being fixed by the soul that selects the evil path. 
Young friends, you are entering upon a life which 
you can shape as the sculptor shapes his marble and 
the potter his clay. You are passing into a vale 
where upspring two paths ; you can follow either of 
them and find victory or defeat. You have eaten of 
the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, that grew in 
your Eden, and before you there will always hang 
the two forms of fruit to be plucked and eaten. 
Henceforth it is for you a two-fold world and you 
must be at least as noble as the Hercules who, when 



THE BETTER CHOICE. \2J 

accosted by two beautiful forms, the one mere 
Pleasure and the other Honor, reached out his hand 
to the latter and won a place among the immortals. 
In our ennobled age you must toss the golden apple 
to moral beauty. Never forget the duality of your 
earth, and then the office of the human will will rise 
up before you in all its divineness. Remember that 
the same land produces the poppy and the rose, both 
rich in scarlet, but from the one comes the Lethean 
sleep of mind and soul, from the other a perfume 
straight from the gardens of the angels. Life is 
nothing but the passing by of the one flower and the 
plucking and wearing of the other. 



IX. 
EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 



And the child grew and became strong in Spirit, filled with wis- 
dom and the grace of God was upon him. — Luke ii : 40. 

In those brief sketches of Christ which are called 
the gospels, eighteen years of experience are wholly 
wanting. Indeed in only one of those memoirs is 
allusion made to the fact that at the age of twelve 
years the young Jesus of Nazareth discoursed with 
some learned men in Jerusalem. To the eighteen 
years between this scene and the beginning of the 
public*work of Christ no allusion is made by any one 
of the four biographers. In the legends of the old 
church there is much related regarding the boyhood 
of him who founded our common religion, but since 
these legends contain only amazing stories that con- 
tain no traces of real human nature, and since legend 
has always weighed down with details of fiction all the 
great names of antiquity, we cannot but prefer the 
silence of the four gospels to the too abundant loquac- 
ity of the early Church. If the contemporaries — the 
four evangelists — knew little or had access to little 

(128) 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 129 

that related to the early life of their Master, it is 
hardly probable that a detailed and amazing informa- 
tion sprang up for the use of those who lived genera- 
tions or centuries later. Let us inquire as to the 
probable history of those eighteen absent years. 

It may be well to make a remark to explain, if pos- 
sible, this large omission from these professed biogra- 
phies. The best explanation is this, that in that epoch, 
and in almost all past periods, child life was not a 
matter of importance. It did not enter largely into 
literature nor into the category of the great things of 
the world. In some nations the death-day rather than 
the birthday was celebrated because the latter period 
was associated with fame or learning or some other 
form of merit, while the birthday enjoyed no associa- 
tions of worth — it was only the period of all shapes 
of weakness. In the most of the ancient philosophies 
the reasonable soul did not come to the body until it 
was about twenty years old. According to one of 
the old Rabbis a man was free at twelve, might marry 
at eighteen or twenty, should acquire property until 
he was thirty, then intellectual strength should come, 
and at forty the profoundest wisdom should appear. 
Amid just what opinions of this nature the youth of 
Jesus was spent is not known, but at least this is true 
that he lived in an era where early life seemed to 

possess small worth and no scholar or biographer 
9 



I30 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

encumbered with such details his record or oration or 
poem. Not only do we know little about the early life 
of Jesus but the early years of Caesar and Virgil and 
Cicero and Tacitus lie equally withdrawn from the 
public gaze. Old biographies make their first chapter 
out of the actual beginnings of the public service. 

The current of thought has of later times greatly 
changed. Not only has childhood become more 
beautiful to be seen, more precious to the parents and 
friends, but it has been more and more seen as the 
fountain whence flows the river of the subsequent 
career. The period of youth springs up as a cause. 
It is analyzed as being the climate and soil which 
help grow the manhood or the rich womanhood. 
The modern depth of affection and the modern reason- 
ing process demand that each full biography of man- 
hood shall fill its first chapters with the whole child- 
hood scene. This affection cherished by the later 
periods, and this desire to find causes for all effects, 
come to-day to make us inquire about those eighteen 
years that are missing from the sacred memoirs of 
the Master. If to the ancients early duties and ex- 
periences and pleasures were of no moment, the times 
have changed and, to us all, they are full of interest 
and instruction. We do not celebrate the death of 
our friends but their birthday, for the death ends the 
blessed scene of which the birthday was the begin- 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 13 I 

The scene of this missing period was evidently the 
district of Lower Galilee and the little town of Naza- 
reth in that district. Had the young Jesus travelled 
all through his youth and have gathered fame in 
all the adjoining lands, such a large fact would have 
appeared in even the simplest record of his life. We 
have more positive evidence that he remained closely 
at home for he was upbraided as being only the car- 
penter's son and with having no learning, and further, 
when Christ began his public teachings he taught 
away from his native village because of the little faith 
there cherished in the divine mission of one who had 
long been known to the villagers as only an humble 
artisan. Thus this story of local contempt comes 
forward to tell us that these unhistoric days were all 
spent in and around the little town which named the 
Nazarene. The scene is not without educational 
elements. The hills which make the site of the place 
are six hundred feet in height, on one side awfully 
steep and rugged, on the other side easy of ascent 
and covered with grass and trees and flowers. Springs 
and cascades are mingled with the cactus and with 
the blossoming orange and pomegranate, and when to 
these dumb forms of beauty we add the merry cry 
and the rich plumage of the hoopoe and bright blue 
of the roller-bird, making the landscape one of life, we 
have surroundings better for a meditative and sensi- 



I32 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

tive heart than the walls of a common school-house. 
Languages and laws change, and change comes over 
many human things, but so uniform and long lasting 
is nature that we know without the disturbance of a 
doubt that the youthful Jesus of Nazareth walked 
again and again all over these fields where fluttered 
the birds which now chirp and fly in the same old 
land, and that he saw the same emerald of grass and 
leaves which now carpets those massive hills. 

This son of a carpenter was himself of that craft, 
but whether he worked much is beyond our conject- 
ure. Trades followed families for many generations. 
Our modern names are many of them old landmarks 
of that custom of antiquity. The Carpenter family 
and the Smith family and the Fisher family and the 
Sailor family are proofs that certain pursuits remained 
in some one household so long that when the active 
following of the trade had ceased the name remained 
and contained, like Moore's shattered vase, the mem- 
ory of the dead rose. Jesus thus belonged to a def- 
inite craft, but that he toiled much is not very prob- 
able. Indeed no freeman of that period toiled as we 
toil. The wants of life were very simple. The 
climate suggested a large amount of repose, and few 
are the instances in which man has not accepted this 
suggestion of the sky. The orientalist began work 
late and quit early. No one was ever in a hurry. 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 133 

The man for whom the work was being done and the 
man doing the work harmonized in not caring 
whether the task should be finished this week or the 
next. Even if Jesus toiled quite regularly at his oc- 
cupation, all was so peaceful in that time and place 
among the better families that we may be assured that 
the plane and the saw did not interfere much with the 
studies or meditations of this gifted youth. That 
taste which led him to seek at the age of twelve long 
discourse with some learned rabbis at Jerusalem was 
not much interfered with in the subsequent time by 
even the uniform pursuit in which he was born and 
reared. Indeed there is a form of learning and skill 
and wisdom which seems aided rather than retarded 
by the daily occupation. A mechanical calling be- 
comes a matter of fingers and arms, and leaves the 
mind and soul free to follow their own spiritual long- 
ings. The familiar manual labor shuts out all dis- 
turbing elements, makes a kind of lullaby which 
gives the soul not sleep but long continuous thought. 
In exciting travel or amid constantly changing scenes 
you all remember that you have no thoughts at all, 
but become half distracted ; but that after you have 
gotten back to your room or shop or desk then back 
comes your mind with all its clearness and continuity 
and wisdom and poetry. Thus a trade, high or 
humble, may easily be the silent gravitation which 



134 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

holds the soul's star in an orbit. It has thus come to 
pass that many a shepherd from David to James 
Hogg, and many a rustic from Cincinnatus to Robert 
Burns has found an humble industry to become the 
absolute ally of a deep wisdom or a life of song. 
A shepherd's crook and the harp, the plow and the 
pen, have been partners of success. The regular roar- 
ing of a train wakes up the spirit of the traveller. 

In the homes of old Nazareth there was not a little 
of common instruction. The Hebrew families taught 
the children to read and write. Christ wrote on the 
ground in a meditative manner, and he constantly 
alluded to what had been written, so that we are war- 
ranted in stating positively that through these eight- 
een missing summers there was a form of carpenter 
work which probably aided reflection more than in- 
jured it, and ran an education sufficient to bring the 
son of Mary into daily communion with some manu- 
scripts and with some of the wise men of the period. 
Add to these facts the undeniable truth that the young 
Nazarene stood above his era in natural powers of 
mind and heart, and we find reasons for concluding 
that these absent years were not a blank in this high 
history, but were a part of that vast career whose two 
borders only are visible in the gospels. Indeed one 
might infer the middle from the two extremes. 
Should we find a young man of twelve making good 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 135 

sketches on a canvas and then, having disappeared, he 
should suddenly come back to public notice as a skil- 
ful painter we should know that the interval not seen 
had been only a continuation of what we saw at the 
twelfth year, and saw on a higher perfection at thirty. 
If a stream is clear and fresh and sweet at its fountain 
and clear and fresh at its mouth, we must conclude 
that it flows all the way through rocky or pebbly 
fields. If Achilles chose a sword when a child and 
then in late mature life waked up the troops upon 
many a battle-field, we must conclude that all through 
and through he was a soldier from heart to brain, 
from head to foot. In such a world of analogies we 
see Jesus at the age of twelve studying the great 
questions of society and of all morals, and thus pon- 
dering about the Father's business, he enters into 
those hidden days, and lo, when he emerges, he has 
the Sermon of the Mount upon his lips. We seem to 
know all the interval, and can say that in those eight- 
een summers and winters this Galilean was putting 
together those truths which afterward shone like a 
sun upon a darkened world. All good and great 
works are the final outcome of a life. The statesman, 
the moralist, the dramatist, the orator, the painter, 
the poet, sits down to his task for thirty years, and 
fortunate is he if at the end of that long period he can 
emerge from his retirement with anything in his 



I36 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

hands for mankind to see, or with any word on his 
lips for mankind to hear. 

It now seems that we can follow Jesus all through 
those unmarked days, and can see him walking at 
times alone, at times in company, over the great hills 
wondering what ruler would come after Archelaus, 
and with what cruelty or kindness would he come, 
and when a redeemer for the Hebrew would appear ? 
Through that mind full of sacred meditation, and of 
sacred Hebrew hope and prophecy must have passed, 
daily, the resolves of a hero, and the colored dreams 
of a young soul. For a score of spring-times, piety 
and meditation and enthusiasm lived in this one 
heart. 

From these evident generalities we can now pass 
to some other conclusions that crowd upon the mind 
which surveys the moral surroundings more in detail. 
Each spring this family made a journey to Jerusalem. 
At the age of twelve this son went with the family. 
That he ever after that visit remained away from the 
annual Passover is not probable. It was the one 
event of each year. The power of religion, the social 
element in man, the pleasures of the trip, the great 
pageantry at Jerusalem combined to make all, who 
could, wend their way in March toward the holy city. 
March was equal in warmth and beauty to the last 
days of our May. It is said that often two millions 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 137 

assembled within the walls in that time of worship 
and memory. The travellers came with music and 
banners. Thither came all the wise men, not only of 
the Hebrew tribes, but of Syria and Persia and Greece, 
drawn into the throng though not fully of it. Naz- 
areth was eighty miles away. The journey thither on 
foot would consume nearly a week, for none hurried 
to such a festival. The companies moved out from 
their villages long in advance that the journey might 
be one of pleasure rather than of toil. The night en- 
campments by some stream under palm or fig trees 
were a part of the excursion not to be slighted. The 
feast lasted eight days. Then came the deliberate 
return home. Thus for a month of each year the 
young man, who became the leader in morals of the 
civilized world, was in the midst of the whole group 
of wise men from the east and south and west. Persia 
and Egypt and Alexandria and Greece proper and 
Rome, joined with the wisdom of Jerusalem in that 
month of the Passover; and, as though in some Paris 
or London of antiquity, Christ stood once each year 
for perhaps twenty successive seasons, w r here the 
streams of learning all seemed to meet. If in his 
twelfth year he had long and thoughtful talks w 7 ith 
the great men who came up to Jerusalem, what must 
we think of those exchanges of ideas and feelings he 
must have enjoyed when his twenty-fifth or twenty- 



I38 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

e'ghth year had come with its greater insight and 
solemnity ? It is evident that what of good moral 
philosophy there had been in Egypt, accumulating 
since before the times of Moses, and what of truth and 
wisdom there had been elaborated by the Magi of 
Persia and by the profound Greeks, and by the 
statesmen and prophets and wise men of the Hebrew 
nation, lay all outpoured before the new and power- 
ful mind of Jesus of Nazareth, and that in those silent 
years he was busy culling the best ideas from the vast 
heap, separating the eternal from the perishable. 
In such a collection of old and recent truths, this new 
guide was a patient eclectic. He made a system of 
the accumulations of the past. 

It was, you remember, a reproach to Christ that he 
was a Galilean, and it was asked sneeringly whether 
any good could come out of Nazareth? But who 
was it that asked this question? Who thus scorned 
the Galilean? Evidently the regular and most strict 
of the Jerusalem Jews. In those days there were 
great centers of orthodoxy just as there are in our 
day, and as Princeton might ask what good can come 
out of Andover or Oberlin, so the Jerusalem Hebrews 
looked with contempt upon the men and the dogmas 
which might venture out from Nazareth. For Galilee 
was somewhat out of the charmed circle of orthodoxy. 
It was called "Galilee of the Gentiles," because being 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 139 

a mountainous region its early occupants had never 
been all killed or conquered. The heathen rational- 
ists and naturalists and merchandizing Greeks and 
Romans and Persians and Assyrians swarmed all over 
it so that Christ drew in his education not where the 
worship of Mosaic ideas was most unbending but 
where it was weakest. He was therefore free in a 
wonderful sense, and while the Spirit of God was upon 
him in those invisible years, the Spirit of the Mosaic 
age was off of his mind and heart, and thus he en- 
joyed two blessings, the descent of the Father and 
the flight of a slavish Mosaism. The Galilee which 
won for Jesus the reproach of Jerusalem helped win 
for him the esteem of the human race, for in Galilee 
the chains of the Mosaic period had become so weak- 
ened that they did not fetter the soul that was yearn- 
ing to speak those thoughts which came at last in the 
Sermon upon the Mount. The mockings of bigots 
was followed by the love of humanity. 

Not only was "Galilee of the Gentiles" always 
the least orthodox but in this period all thought had 
assumed wider range and greater liberty and spiritual- 
ity. The Hebrew power had almost faded into noth- 
ing. It had lost and regained its metropolis many 
times, but sixty years before Christ it had lost its 
sway forever. The Romans had come into full 
possession. All Hebrew officials were only servants 



140 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

of the Caesars. The city with its walls and temple 
stood in all its splendor, but the national and religious 
glory had passed away, and although the religion re- 
mained to the eye it had greatly changed to the heart. 
It was questioned and cross-questioned and by some 
doubted and by some rejected. Pagan thought had 
poured in from the east and the west and the Magi 
that came to see the babe in the manger seemed to 
Herod to bring about as good a religion and vision 
as could come from the priests of Abraham ; and in- 
deed we may say that the Magi and the Hebrews and 
the Roman Virgil all joined in one vague expectation 
that a new King would soon appear. Over the head of 
the crucified Lord the inscription was marked out in 
three languages because three great races were min- 
gling in the streets of the holy city. Born in a Gentile 
region, not fettered by an exclusive form of faith, and 
in an age when the Roman arms had overthrown the 
empire of Solomon and had compelled Latin and 
Greek literature to commingle with the law, the 
prophecies, and the psalms, the meditative Christ had 
a grand task for those eighteen years to walk to and 
fro in his home or shop or in the beautiful hills to find 
what was the grandest in all that museum of ethics 
and doctrine. Instead of being lost or wasted we can 
now see that they were like the years which make a 
nation or build a St. Peter's or a pyramid. 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 141 

"The grace of God was upon him," says the 
record, when he entered this isolation. Not upon 
him for an hour or for a day, but in all those times 
when Judah was dissolving and Rome and rationalism 
were advancing, the grace of the Infinite was with the 
One who lived quietly in Nazareth. Upon the boards 
in his shop he would perhaps write down the thought 
11 Blessed the pure in heart." And perhaps for ten or 
fifteen years was he wondering which is the greatest 
of all laws, and with what delight he must have 
reached the words, u To love God with all the soul and 
your neighbor as yourself! " To him in these days 
of study must have come the maxim of Plato and 
others that one must not do to another what he would 
not have another do to oneself. How many years it 
was before the studying Christ saw the defect of this 
maxim we know not, but we can imagine a day when 
his face was lighted with a smile and he said " This is 
a maxim which only prevents crime, not one which 
commands active kindness," and quickly he reversed 
the language and said, " We must do for others what 
we would have them do for us." Plato had uttered 
a law of rest, Christ changed it to one of action. In 
those days could we have entered the home of this 
candidate for immortal fame and truth, we should 
have found on the walls of home or shop the tracings 
of that " golden rule" where affection had written it 



142 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

down when it had burst upon him in all its imperish- 
able beauty. One by one all those lessons of duty 
and righteousness and salvation which so glitter in 
the New Testament were thus gathered up by a mind 
powerful in itself and powerful in the grace of God. 
The jewels of the gospels were thus many years in 
the gathering and do not come to us as the sudden 
extempore speech of an ignorant slavish laborer, but 
as of one who passed eighteen years in communion 
with man and self and God before he opened his lips 
in presence of the world. 

Coming now toward the close of these unhistoric 
times a new figure appears upon the scene. A rel- 
ative of Jesus, born six months before the babe of the 
manger, had now reached that grand age of thirty, 
and had begun to preach in the wilderness — that is in 
lonely country places. He followed the dress and 
customs of the old Hebrew prophets. His raiment 
was a wrapping of coarse cloth held around his waist 
by a leather girdle. He found his food in the woods 
and fields where fruits and wild honey were abun- 
dant. He moved along the paths and the roads, and 
when he came to where there was one person or ten 
persons he began his wild chant, " Repent ye, repent 
ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Out of 
the fallen greatness of Judah, out of the growing an- 
archy and unbelief, and out of the longing for a King 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 143 

of wisdom and love this sigh was born. Each day 
the multitude grew larger around this wild but holy 
form, and each day the winds of fame blew further 
and further the aroma of his words. Many thought 
him the expected Savior, but he replied that he was 
not. He could have called the common people 
around his flag and have set up a spiritual kingdom of 
his own. He could have become the Mahomet of his 
day and have exchanged his dust and ashes for the 
pomp of some captain of thousands or of millions. 
But his heart was pure, his mission humble and sin- 
cere. He said he was only a herald running on in 
advance of the King. All wishing to be members of 
this coming divine state were baptized in its name in 
the Jordan river. 

Christ was in his thirtieth year. His full manhood 
of mind had come. His heart had become full of 
longings to go forth and teach the truths which had 
been assembling for years in his heart. Upon some 
day in the summer time some slow traveller brought 
him the news that a certain John, called the Baptist, 
was preaching a new Kingdom better than that of the 
Caesars — a Kingdom of God, and that crowds were 
joining the new hope. The scene of the new move- 
ment was about thirty miles away from the cottage in . 
Nazareth. It is almost certain that Christ spent the 
ensuing night in meditation and prayer. In the 



144 EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 

morning quite early, before the sun had become op- 
pressive, this awakened soul walked forth over hill 
and vale to go to the Jordan where such scenes were 
daily coming to pass. It may have required two 
days to bring the Man of Bethlehem to the man of the 
wilderness. But while he walks mark how beautiful 
are the woods above his head and the rich sunlight 
all around him ! The velvet of grass and flowers be- 
neath his sandaled feet recall and make literal the 
words "How beautiful upon the mountains are the 
feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, that publish- 
eth peace !" But not all our thoughts can be thus 
light and joyous, for the home life was soon to end 
and with a public career were to come many hitherto 
unknown sorrows. Foreheads to be crowned with 
service and duties are always to be crowned also with 
thorns. But the divine One looks not back. He 
sees the Jordan at last and marks the outline of a 
Hebrew prophet and step by step he approaches the 
eloquent herald. It is one of the most important in- 
cidents of mind and heart in all history ! Can you 
think of afty event more sublime in results than this 
meeting of John and Christ on the banks of that 
stream ? John was ready for the hour. He had no 
false or weak ambition to gratify. He desired the 
happiness and salvation of man. Lifting up his face 
and looking toward the stranger whom at once he 



EIGHTEEN MISSING YEARS. 145 

perceived to be Jesus, he said : " Behold Him whose 
shoe latchet I am unworthy to stoop down and un- 
loose ! I am not that light ! Behold Him who is 
the Light !" And John in that lonely place resigned 
the crown. Humbly Christ received it. The resign- 
ing of John and the acceptance by the Man of Naza- 
reth are pictures alike full of grace and humility. The 
eighteen missing years are thus ended and Christ 

passes again into history. 
10 



X. 
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 



Be thou faithful unto death, and Iwill give thee a crown of life.— 
Rev. ii : io. 

One obstacle in the way of human success lies in 
the fact that man has so many capabilities that it is 
difficult to develop them equally from his childhood, 
and equally difficult to keep them all in active exist- 
ence in and through mature years. The brute crea- 
tion enjoys two advantages, not the one only of being 
guided unerringly by instinct, but that of possessing 
a nature not subject to many laws. Man has so many 
powers that he is exposed to a hundred forms of fail- 
ure, and like a magician dancing among knives which 
he is throwing around with his own hands, must be 
upon the alert lest some form or second of danger be 
overlooked. The more complex the machine the 
more difficult is its motion ; the more easily is it 
thrown out of repair. As the richness of a soil is 
often its injury, causing it to send up more weeds and 
grasses and grains than can thrive well in one place, 
or to grow a stalk so tall that it breaks too easily 

(i 4 6) 



FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 1 47 

under the summer shower, so man's mind suffers from 
its marvellous collection of desires and powers and 
sinks under an overload of activities. Thus a perfect 
man or woman is impossible. As in the history of 
the body under the artificial laws of society and the 
inexplicable freaks of nature no one reaches perfect 
beauty, but must be told at last of some defect of 
some feature or of size or voice or walk or gesture, so 
in the history of the mind the record of defects fills a 
large chapter, and we say he is wise, but not bright, 
or bright but not deep, or good-natured but penuri- 
ous, or honest but cold, or learned but selfish. Thus 
virtues come and go, and the heavens of the soul are 
as variable as an April sky. 

If we had permission to demand from the Creator 
some form of merit which the civilized states have 
not yet fully acquired or even measured, but of which 
the need is most pressing, should we not all say, let 
it be faithfulness? Is not that a virtue which our 
times greatly need ? Let us not dispute with Paul 
when he says, " The greatest of all is charity " ; but 
let us confess that charity must indeed be a rare form 
of excellence if it can surpass the heart dreamed of by 
St. John as having been faithful unto death. Let us 
turn away from Paul's picture of charity to look upon 
John's statue of faithfulness. It was a defect of Greek 
sculpture that its marbles stood chiefly for physical 



148 FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 

perfection and not for the highest forms of mental 
finish. The Venus, the Apollo at least, were expected 
to recall all the physical loveliness of mankind; it is 
an excellence of modern art that it aims to picture 
ideal truths as well as ideal forms ; and were it to 
carve or paint an image of Fidelity, and were it to do 
justice to the subject, we should see a work of amaz- 
ing beauty. When we cause to pass before us the at- 
tractive qualities of our age, we see a procession long 
and noble as some of those pictured upon old wall or 
frieze of Roman temple. Beauty, conversation, learn- 
ing, taste, music, festivity, worship, science, and 
poetry are in the great collection, but are we wrong 
in the conclusion that there is one form of human 
greatness that is not seen often enough in our groups 
of great ideals — that form is the being over which 
you could write the words, " Faithful unto death." 
When written, such a phrase will be found over the 
tomb of some mother or child ; but the civilization 
of the world will never be worthy of laudation until 
those words are engraved upon all the many forms of 
the human heart. 

Evidently the original import of faith, when it was 
denominated the way of salvation and the doctrine of 
a M standing or falling church," was an unchanging 
devotion to the new master. The new religion asked 
for new minds and new hearts, and inasmuch as per- 



FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 



149 



secution was sure to follow an espousal of a new 
chieftain, those only were demanded who could see a 
great result, and keep their faces set steadfastly upon 
it through storm and calm. Faith was not an intellect- 
ual discrimination of doctrines, but it was the con- 
stancy of a soul amid great trials. As Christ himself 
defined it, it was a willingness to stand by the welfare 
of man and the higher right, even though wife or 
child or father or mother should follow some other 
path. Such a definition of faith will explain the 
glory, almost the charm of martyrdom in the first 
centuries' — the true dignity of an early Christian re- 
posing not in what he believed in detail, but in his 
heroism over the main issue — the central figure. 
Faithful over a few things they would be rulers over 
many things in the golden period to come. The fact 
of martyrdom is thus to be explained by the glory 
of a consistent devotion. 

The human race has always laughed at or been 
angry at all fickleness of mind, and has generally 
charged it upon woman, because man, being the 
maker of literature and being the ruling power, has 
always possessed too much vanity to see the frailties 
of himself, and early learned to ascribe inconstancy to 
woman. Virgil learned it from the old world back 
of him, and thus shows us that man having written 
his own history has made himself to be a person- 



150 FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 

age of conspicuous goodness in this one direction. 
In our day the facts are of more value than the feel- 
ings of men, and probably indicate that in the posses- 
sion of fidelity, woman will be found rich when her 
husband or brother is a beggar. Be this as it may, 
the world has always heaped upon fickleness its anger 
and laughter and ridicule. The poets have compared 
a changing heart to the chameleon hues, the think- 
ers have despised it as a poor philosophy, the jesters 
have hailed it with laughter. 

Our world is so formed that it asks for persistence. 
Society is based upon the constancy of nature's laws. 
What the snow or rain or sun or soil did last year it 
will do next year. Wood will float in water, and iron 
will be as strong in the next century as it was in the 
last. We know that the sandal wood will act as 
sweetly for the next age as it acts for the woman of 
our day, and that the rose will decorate a bosom to- 
morrow as richly as it decorated the bosom when 
Cornelia was a Roman girl happy in the home of 
Scipio. Looking into the future you know what the 
fields and hills will be in next May and June, and in 
that certainty of sunshine and foliage the imagination 
can find rest. Thus all nature conspiring in its num- 
berless details to one result has fashioned for us 
the words that our God is "from everlasting to 
everlasting," and with " Him is no variableness or 



FAITHFUL UNTO DFA Til. \ 5 1 

shadow of turning." These words of honor which 
nature proclaims over its Creator it is anxious to find 
in the soul of the greatest creation — man. Out of 
nature and God has grown the first fame of con- 
stancy ; out of the actual history of man has come an 
equal amount of honor. 

History has crowned perseverance as one of the 
virtues. Men of deviating purpose have lived to 
develop the good of their character or brain or of their 
invention, and have thus hammered out the maxim 
that there is no excellence without labor and that 
perseverance will conquer all things. Soldiers are 
estimated by their staying qualities. Tributes of 
praise have thus come in from many fields of experi- 
ment until we now see before us a grace called faith- 
fulness, one of the most attractive of all in the mind's 
dream. Whether seen in the Antigone of the Greeks 
— that ideal sister who would not desert even the 
dead body of her brother; or in the Penelope who 
trusted for twenty years in the returning ships of her 
husband; or in the disciples around Christ who died 
at last, here or there, in obedience to their attach- 
ment, or in the long line of martyrs whose blood is 
sprinkled all over the leaves of history, this fidelity 
stands forth in unmeasured excellence. So grand is 
this virtue that it now seems that could it come into 
our world to-day civilization would seem complete. 



152 FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 

Such scenes as the dishonest officer of Tennessee, 
stealing a half million with one hand while he is 
gesticulating the eloquence of honesty with the 
other, are so common as to cause only the wonder of 
an hour. A state deeply injured by old political 
errors at last comes forth penitential but heroic and 
hopeful ; and attempts to found public education and 
public industry, and to mark out paths of honor for 
all black and white ; and calling to her aid one of 
her most popular and most trusted sons, she had the 
pitiable unhappiness to see him skulk away by night 
— a bandit — a thief instead of a son and citizen. The 
nation is full of these human beings who have no 
conception of the beauty of faithfulness. The thought 
that nature is holding a crown over each faithful one 
has never entered their souls. Even into the mind 
and heart of the unfortunate Archbishop Purcell, of 
Cincinnati, there never could have been any adequate 
sense of the value of fidelity. He was kind-hearted 
to an extreme degree, and he was fond of the success 
of his creed. Meanwhile the poor Catholics were 
trusting to this Archbishop four millions of dollars 
they were never to see again. He did not even keep 
books. He had not trained himself to fidelity, but 
had left himself to become the greatest modern 
emblem of business recklessness. Others have sur- 
passed him in dishonesty of purpose, but he stands 



FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 153 

without a peer in the large crowd of the reckless. 
Fidelity to a day-book and ledger would have been 
of more value to Archbishop Purcell than all the 
incense around his altar and all the processions of 
his chanting priests. 

Nature has so made her worlds, our world at least, 
that when in any of her works you omit the word 
gl faithful " you have done or suffered an injury. The 
poor victims of loss in Cincinnati send up a faint cry 
compared with those shrieks of anguish which filled 
the cold winter air a few days since, a few miles 
away. Those men and those hard toiling girls spring- 
ing from windows a hundred feet from the solid 
ground, leaping out with a furnace behind them and 
an abyss in front of them, screamed and fell and died 
at the command of unfaithfulness. Builders and 
owners and managers all were reckless guardians of 
human life and each life was lost by their indirect 
command. The heroes who once fell in an awful 
carnage enjoyed in dying this thought : " We lie here 
at the command of our country; " but over the dead 
of last Wednesday the painful epitaph must be writ- 
ten : 

We were tortured to death by faithlessness. 

Watchmen pacing each floor in the night ; watch- 
men relieved at short intervals, would have robbed 
the original architect and builders of their power to 



154 FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH, 

maim and kill. But faithfulness to duty was not a 
part of those who built or who managed the machine 
of death. Mortar and brick and wood enter into all 
these large structures, but faithfulness is not thought 
a part of building material. It is too expensive for 
common use. The calamity of our sister city may be 
our calamity to-morrow; for it is all a question of an 
overturned lamp, or of a mouse and a match. Man 
does not govern his world, he only lives in it ; and 
he does always live long and often his death is ter- 
rible. He builds windows to admit light and air, but 
they are often made use of by convulsed persons who 
clasp the sills and scream for mercy to the crowd be- 
low ; he builds stairway and an elevator with which to 
climb to his bed at night, but he does not always 
come down by his convenient instruments. If the 
match or the pile of oiled rags or a fluttering curtain 
say so, the inmates hurl themselves from the upper 
windows and are mangled until no affection can see 
the features of loved ones. Thus the King of Kings, 
the Legislator of the universe, punishes all contempt 
for truth and constancy and comes to all the thinkers 
and all the patriots and all the men holding offices of 
trust, to all the builders of houses, and says : " Be ye 
all faithful and the reward is near your foreheads. " 

There seems no place in all the wide expanse of 
society where one can pause and say, " Here have we 






FAITHFUL UNTO DEA TH. I 5 5 

found faithfulness in its full bloom. " In the relation 
of mother to child it is more universal and deeper than 
in any other path of human life. Here the poets 
come to find an affection full of faithfulness: 

u Ah, blest are they for whom 'mid all their pains 
That faithful and unaltered love remains, 
Life wrecked around them hunted from their rest 
And by all else forsaken or distressed." 

When his mother's portrait was shown him, Cowper 
said: 

" Oh, that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
With me but roughly since I heard thee last. 
Those lips are thine ; thy own sweet smile I see, ^ 

The same that oft in childhood solaced me." 

Up to this phenomenon of soul religion comes when 
it desires to illustrate the love of God ; and hither 
come the moralists when they wish to prove that duty 
may be without admixture of self-interest. In mod- 
ern times this one word — mother — is most fully un- 
veiling itself, because it is only a mind strong in 
learning and sensitive by culture that can measure 
such a height or such a depth of devotion. 

What a garden of Eden should we have should this 
faithfulness unto death spring up in the marriage re- 
lation as it has sprung up between mother and child ! 
But here the recklessness of the human race re-appears, 
and this matrimonial fabric is built for a day and is 



1 5 6 FAITHFUL UNTO DEA TIT. 

not founded upon rock like the mountains or the 
pyramids. Enough instances of infinite faithfulness 
exist to cast light upon the divine meaning of this 
great friendship, but not enough instances to secure 
for the homes of earth the most perfect happiness. 
The enemies of this tie are as numerous as the ene- 
mies of the wheat field or the vineyard. It was once 
thought that nothing was so valuable to the multitude 
as their bread and wine. In holy and profane books 
these two products stood for a strong body and a 
happy heart. The vineyard and the harvest field 
thus were used to express the goodness of land and 
of climate and of government and of God's providence. 
Here where most hopes were centered most foes ap- 
peared, and above all that grows the harvest field and 
the vineyard are most easily blighted. Rust, damp, 
insect, mildew, frost, and nameless unseen enemies 
seem always hovering around the borders of these 
blessed fields. The more valuable a house the more 
do the bandits and plunderers look toward it by day 
and night. Thus the marriage relation, perhaps the 
chief basis of society, is attacked by the most bandits 
from the woods or the desert. Compared with this sen- 
timent a mother's love enjoys peace. It can bloom in a 
rich soil under a serene sky. As against nuptial per- 
fection the depravity of the heart musters all its motley 
troops. The selfishness that will not admit of an equal 



FAITHFUL UNTO DEA Tff. I 5 7 

partnership, the selfishness that permits the wife to be a 
slave that the master may be free, the egoism which 
persuades the husband that he has outgrown the wife, 
or the wife that she has passed up above her hus- 
band, the degraded feelings which wonder if youth 
and beauty have not departed and which can not 
measure the value of a soul, the innate fickleness of 
mere passion which must have new toys each day, 
are specimens of the wild Arabs which come swoop- 
ing down upon the rich train before it has moved 
many days' march from the orange blossoms and the 
loving benedictions of friends. There is no peculiar 
reason to be found in the times for the frequent failure 
of marriage-bells to ring in great happiness. Indeed 
the growing intelligence so confessed should now be 
making not only improved houses but improved in- 
mates of houses, and should be making domestic love 
as fine and beautiful as the furniture and fixtures 
which are around it, or as the floor or carpets under 
foot. The truth is that total depravity has always 
loved to display itself in this relation of heart to heart, 
and in our era as in all before it labors incessantly to 
make a hell of a paradise. 

To us thus pondering amid the human hearts and 
faces, happy or sad, which fill the houses or throng 
our streets, there comes the feeling that " faithfulness " 
is a new divinity whose coming a half-divine race 



158 FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 

tearfully awaits. The young man entering a pro- 
fession, the lawyer on the morning of a possible career, 
the young clergyman writing his first sermon, the 
officer assuming his place of responsibility, the patriot 
espousing the cause of his native land, the mother 
looking into the blue eyes of her infant, the husband 
taking the hand of his bride, the Christian looking at 
the cross, should all alike bow in the great temple of 
nature, and hear the law of success read to them in 
voices loud or soft, awful or sweet: " Be thou faith- 
ful unto death. " 

In the great blue there are planets and stars which 
are said to have passed through their great million- 
year life, and by slow decline to have parted with 
their last form of organized existence, and to be un- 
able any longer to show a colored insect in a ray of 
light or even a spray of moss upon a rock. Our 
moon is thus counted as a desolation wrought in the 
old eternity ; but so are there in the same depths of 
space other worlds, where the forms of life are just 
beginning to appear and where the morning of a sub- 
lime day is just dawning with its first dews and first 
flowers and first song of birds. This faithfulness 
unto death is not a burned-up star whose glory has 
long since faded ; but it is rather a new world yet to 
wheel around in a grand orbit and be the home of a 
noble race. The human family is not standing in the 



FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. 1 59 

evening but in the morning of its intellectual and 
moral destiny. 

The " Lost Chord " of the poet and musician is an 
idea richly ornamented with pathos and sublimity — 
a piece of soul lace- work : 

" He struck one chord of music 
Like the sound of a great amen, 
It flooded the crimson twilight 

Like the close of an angel's psalm ;" 

but the heavenly note trembled away in silence, and 
he vainly ran over the organ-keys to find once more 
the strange tone divine. It would not come back, 
and he could hope for it only in times beyond the 
tomb. But this " faithfulness unto death " is not a 
chord lost from earth, but a strain struggling to enter 
in. It will sound at times in the inner recesses of all 
your spirits with its "touch of infinite calm;" and if 
our ear is too heavy to catch its great amen, it will 
not sink into silence but it will await the coming of 
nobler men and nobler women; for God's will is yet 
to be done on earth as it is done in heaven, and faith- 
fulness shall be crowned on both sides of the grave. 



XI. 
THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 



The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. — John x : ii. 

Our land has grown out of its fertile soil an avowed 
enemy of the preacher. A man witty and eloquent 
and bold seems to have entered upon a life-long war- 
fare against the clergy of whatever name. He passes 
from city to city and from town to town, not with 
Gough's eloquence against intemperance, not with the 
old eloquence of Everett upon the character of Wash- 
ington, not with the silver speech of Wendell Phillips 
upon the arts or the heroism of L'Ouverture, not with 
the useful lessons of Greeley upon the economies of 
life, but with interminable complaints against all the 
tenets and teachers of religion. If this public speaker 
attempts to point out the oddities of a Talmage and 
would make a subject of " Talmagian Theology," the 
field always proves too small for his rhetoric, and 
beginning with a single eccentric preacher this lecturer 
quickly passes to the entire religion of the human 
race. Let his sentences begin as they may they 
hasten to form a general protest against all ideas and 

(160) 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. i6l 

sentiments that bear the name of religion. He moves 
along only one path, that one marked out by the 
Thersites of the Greek army, and is less kind than 
Thomas Paine and less broad and less learned than 
Voltaire, He has none of the outbranchings of mind 
and sentiment which helped ornament Bolingbroke 
and Hume and Gibbon. He masses all his forces 
into the one purpose, that of being an enemy of the 
common preacher. If any one shall deny him breadth 
of learning or feeling, that one must give him the 
credit of having power of concentration. Like a sun- 
glass he throws what rays he has upon one point, 
and thus makes his words carry the most possible of 
smoke and heat. Thus has he made himself into an 
enemy of the preacher — first and last and always an 
enemy. 

There were errors and follies in the church which 
called for an acute and searching review from some 
critic who should stand outside the temple; for in 
the spiritual sense as in the physical we do not "see 
ourselves as others see us," and could any one have 
risen up against the errors of Calvinism and against 
many almost disgraceful theories as to the character 
of God, he would have done all religion a valuable 
service ; but a general and persistent attack upon the 
whole theory of a church and a ministry does not 

seem to possess a single element of the true or the 
11 



1 62 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

beautiful or the good. Such attack is not eloquence, 
but only fault-finding upon a scale so large as to 
make a complaining mind seem to be a philosopher. 
Who is this preacher that seems to need expulsion 
from this earth ? Is the world too good for his pres- 
ence ? Is his calling such as to impede art and learn- 
ing and morals ? Has he introduced intemperance 
and all the vices and the frauds ? Are the other 
pursuits all so noble that this one profession has be- 
come a spot on the sun ? — a fly in the sweet ointment 
of the apothecary ? He must take a very imperfect 
view of the world-full of avocations who can not see 
that all of them are marked with imperfection and are 
open to a large amount of complainings whenever 
the complaining heart comes along. Whoever has 
the spirit of abuse need never want for a subject, for 
defects are as numerous in our world as are the flies 
of midsummer. The world was made imperfect that 
man might always make his new year better than his 
past, and might enjoy the inspiration found in going 
forward. Much of human happiness is found in the 
gradual advance of the individual and of the race. We 
are all happier if we know something to-night we did 
not know yesterday, or have seen to-day the sweetest 
rose we ever saw, or heard the best music we ever 
heard. We seem born in a valley that we may 
always have the pleasure of making an ascent and of 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 163 

marking the growing landscape and the earlier rising 
and later setting of the sun in a horizon always widen- 
ing so as to hold more of the golden glory. All the 
so-named learned professions have been the mere 
efforts of apprentices to do some task which in its best 
shape is beyond their reach. There is not a calling 
which may not be made a subject of laughter. Essays 
have been written to show that society would have 
more law and order if it had no lawyers, and would 
enjoy better health if it had no physicians, and Em- 
erson playfully said we should all be happier if we 
had no amusements. All things are on the way 
toward the ideal, but no one of these journeying pil- 
grims has yet reached his Mecca or Jerusalem. There 
is an ideal music, but it has not fully come to any 
concert-hall or church or parlor; there is an ideal 
religion on its way to mankind, but it has not yet 
reached any denomination or any formula of doctrine, 
and thus the legal profession and the medical profes 
sion and the editorial pursuit have an ideal excellence 
to w T hich no one of those avocations has made any 
near approach. The peculiarities of times and the 
blunders and eccentricities of individuals accumulate 
against a pursuit and modify the public admiration 
by mingling with it too much of laughter. The anec- 
dotes to the disadvantage of the lawyer and the phy- 
sician would fill volumes. The stage is weighed 



1 64 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

down with a heavy load of bad actors, painting is in- 
jured by its annex of bad artists, music by whole 
flocks of bad singers and bad performers. All these 
earthly things must drag their garments in the mire 
and must give evident signs of passing through a 
world made of dirt. 

What then was John Calvin but a man who at- 
tempted to be a theologian, but must at last be said 
to have failed. He gave the labor of years to the* 
patient study of what God did in the past and would 
do in the future with His rational creatures ; and now 
after generations have passed away, it is generally 
admitted that the Creator of the world has done and 
will do nothing of the kind of work assigned to Him 
by the man of Geneva. That was simply Calvin's 
mistake, and should weigh no more against religion 
than the astronomy of Herodotus should weigh 
against that of Galileo and Herschel. It was simply 
the opinion of the ancients that the sun went daily 
around the earth ; and now, at last, that opinion has 
perished, and the sun and moon and stars are not in- 
jured by its stay in our world. Thus Calvin and 
Edwards were only individuals that came and went 
with their strange thought, and to-day there are clergy- 
men who are filling theology with the temporary 
traits of men, and who merit only the laughter or 
smile of an hour. The kind of language used by a 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 165 

Talmage, the figures of speech which occur in his rhet- 
oric as to the punishment of the non-believer, are his 
own personal property, and do not belong to even his 
own denomination much less to modern Christianity. 
The " Talmagian Theology " is a kind of amazing 
statement such as Carlyle loved in his essays and dis- 
cussions, and is not worthy of more than a passing 
remark. It is not the style of the great army of 
preachers any more than the tremendous adjectives 
of an Arab or an African are the standards of popular 
speech. In each department of mental labor there 
are phenomenal men and all the fair mind can do with 
these is to dislike or admire their peculiarities, but the 
same fair mind must look to the wide-spread facts 
when it wishes to measure a profession as large as 
that of the law or the pulpit. 

Who then is this average preacher who is now at- 
tacked by a popular enemy ? He is a hard-working 
man who, upon small pay, has toiled hard in the past 
and who is toiling hard in the present — for what ? — 
always for the happiness of society. There may have 
been centuries in which the world held so little truth 
and wisdom that the preachers had not much of value 
to give to the populace ; but if one will estimate this 
toiler by the Protestant work in the last two centuries 
alone he will find that no other laborer has done so 
much for the multitude and for so small a reward in 



1 66 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

gold. An eloquence which pleads for the welfare of 
4 man, woman, and child," and which has many tears 
of pity for them because Calvin may have consigned 
most of them to eternal fire, ought to gather into its 
argument the labors of all the country and village 
and city pastors undergone in two hundred years for 
the immediate happiness of that " man, woman, and 
child" which fill up the foreground of the oration. 
That is not a genuine sympathy for the people which 
can overlook the general work of the clergy in the 
world's behalf. The heart that truly pities and loves 
mankind will discriminate very carefully, and will not 
confuse the pastorate of a George MacDonald or of a 
Canon Farrar or of a Norman Macleod with the 
doctrines of election and reprobation and miraculous 
answers of prayer ; but a dramatic love will do this ; 
it will consult nothing but the unity of a single per- 
formance. A rhetorical sympathy will weep that 
some one taught that children might be lost, but an 
actual living sympathy will gather the little ones into 
schools, will sweeten their home life, will enlarge their 
pleasures, will teach them truthfulness and kindness, 
and will in all ways toil for them as though they were 
already inhabitants of the skies. This kind of sym- 
pathy all the pastors have revealed for two hundred 
years. If certain trains of Calvinistic reasoning led to 
the conclusion that some infants would be damned, 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 167 

no logic ever led the human heart to act upon that 
hypothesis, for all the world's pastors have surpassed 
the infidels in leading children toward a heaven here 
and hereafter. The doctrines have varied and have 
given the age such personages as Baptists and Meth- 
odists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists and 
Episcopalians and Unitarians. Amid these many 
minds the future world has passed along in as many 
pictures of itself. Some see a terrific punishment ; 
some a second probation for some offenders, some a 
second probation and final triumph of all ; some the 
death of the wicked and the immortality of only those 
who lived well this life ; but under all this variety of 
opinion the life of the pastor has been always the one 
unchanging thing — the effort of a heart to make a 
community better and happier. If you should in- 
vestigate that notorious high church, St. Albans, of 
London, in which perhaps your plain taste would be 
offended by gaudy colors and excessive external 
forms, you would find that its clergy and money are 
educating not hundreds but thousands of the poor, 
and have done those noble deeds so many years that, 
could all those thus led from sin and ignorance to 
virtue and light be assembled now in one multitude, 
infidelity looking upon the scene would bow its head 
in shame that its eloquence could not point to any 
similar spectacle. Brought thus into comparison, in- 



1 68 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

fidelity would hasten to tear its rhetorical laurels 
from its unworthy temples. But the moral good 
springing up around the church of St. Albans is only 
a single rose plucked from a Christian world which 
has ten thousand fields where such love-red leaves are 
seen. But the new, impetuous enemy of the pastor 
can not see living facts, but only old abstract ideas ; 
and while chasing after these he tramples under care- 
less foot the richest humanities of our globe. One 
can find in the book-stores the biography of a 
single pastor, whose work, limited thus to one soul 
and by that span of time that lies between the 
morning and the night of life, brought more good 
to a country than could have come to it by any 
other profession than that of the common pastor. 
The beautiful California was the scene of this man's 
labors, and the days of gamblers and murderers were 
the time of that drama which would have been thrill- 
ing if the human crowd were just enough to the sub- 
lime in humble life. This preacher began his work 
when he could find only about a score of Christians 
in that city which has since become The Golden Gate. 
So homeless was he in the outset that he sought 
shelter at night in the same dens with gamblers — for 
all public places were dens of sin and crime. He saw 
men fall in fights and in murder. He took up his 
abode in a society unblessed with the presence of worn- 



THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 169 

an or child, and denied, as it seemed, the presence 
of even a compassionate God. Out of such a gold- 
mad multitude this one man brought forth the finer 
qualities of the human heart; he gathered up the 
memories of better days, of pious homes, of long 
absent mothers and sisters and wives, and compelled 
the hymns of religion to displace many an oath, and 
the simple little church to arise where only the eye 
had seen the haunt of the gambler. And yet the deeds 
of that one faithful preacher have been repeated in all 
parts of the States and Empires which now compose 
the wide outlines of civilization. You do not even 
ask whether he was a Methodist or a Baptist or a 
Calvinist or an Episcopalian, because you know so 
well that the picture here painted can be found over 
and over again in the history of any Christian sect. 

Last summer there passed along toward his mother 
country a plain Protestant Bishop, seeking a brief 
rest. Was he turning aside from applause and ease 
and with a purse well filled with gold to be a luxuri- 
ous traveller among the resorts of fashion ? He was 
the Bishop of some lonely islands in the Atlantic, and 
for many years had gone on foot and on horse and in 
a sail boat to and fro among the natives who offered no 
charm except the worth of their mysterious souls. 
He lived and toiled that in those islands might be laid 
the foundations of human happiness. Learned, but 



170 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

plainly clad, powerful in mind and kindhearted in 
nature, poor in gold but rich in spirit, he looked out 
toward his England with a merit greater than that of 
the soldiers about to return in such fame from the 
bloody fields of Alexandria. The coast of California 
and the shores of England are far apart, but all the 
land and sea between has been long occupied by these 
soldiers of humanity whose weapons are pleadings and 
prayers and books and hymns, and whose victories 
bring no tears. Wide however as is the world be- 
tween the Pacific and the Queen's islands, the solici- 
tude and toil of the faithful pastor are wider far and 
reach from the temple steps of Athens where Paul 
preached, to the coast of Africa where Moffat and 
Livingstone spent a life in exile from the grandest of 
nations and the happiest of homes. The history of 
modern civilization is so entangled with the history of 
the laborious and self-denying pastors that no analysis 
can ever separate the progress of man from this belief 
in a God and from the varied blossomings of that 
hope and trust. The woods have at the same time 
heard the ax of the pioneer and the prayer and hymn 
of the missionary. In the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries the new world, reaching from Italy to the 
American lakes, was urged onward more by a re- 
formed religion than by the impulse of the Baconian 
philosophy or the kindling love of gold. Mission- 



THE PREACHER AND HIS EXE MY. 171 

aries sailed from all the great centers of traffic and 
learning ; graduates in Oxford and Cambridge and in 
Heidelberg and over the sea in Yale and Harvard en- 
tered the ministry not from a love of gain, but because 
there seemed to await them in that field the greatest 
returns of usefulness. The little meeting-house 
sprang up at the crossings of the roads, and many a 
valley where water and trees met, the camp-meeting 
out-did the old cathedrals in misereres and glorias, 
The foundations of nations were thus laid in prayer 
and song. 

Our calmer and more fastidious period smiles at 
the ways and means of all former days ; but after 
smiling a moment at the religious fashions of yester- 
day, we suddenly remember that " the fashion of this 
world passeth away;" that " generation cometh and 
generation passeth, but the earth abideth forever, " 
and carries onward all the solid education and morals, 
and cares no more about the eccentric men or methods 
or creeds of yesterday than it grieves over the cos- 
tumes worn by Bacon or Watt or Franklin or Wash- 
ington. Rising above the little accidents of the 
clergyman's history, when we are in the upper height 
of meditation we see the last three centuries, the 
mightiest of earth, marching forward under church 
flags and cheered by the music of those two worlds 
which death divides. In such hours of deep medita- 
tion over the causes of this modern grandeur you 



172 THE PREACHER AND HIS ENEMY. 

seem to be a brother of the German Uhland, who, a 
half hundred years ago, dreamed of a church in the 
woods, the path to which he could not find, but whose 
power none the less came to his heart : 

M In the deep forest far away 

The wanderer hears the sound of bells. 
Whence comes the music, who can say ? 

For scarcely one old legend tells. 
It cometh from the old church gray 

That lies in deep, unbroken calm, 
Where hundreds went of yore to pray 

Or joined to raise the holy psalm. 
I went into the woods to pray ; 

From other paths I wandered wide 
For freedom from the evil day; 

For rest and righteousness I sighed ; 
The music from the ancient tower 

Came, soothing through the forest air, 
And rose and swelled in greater power 

As higher rose my soul in prayer.'' 

Following long the holy leadings of the bells, the 
poet found at last the gray stone church, and declares 
that 

" The solemn glory of the shrine, 

As at the altar steps I kneeled, 
The sounds of harmony, divine, 

Can never be in words revealed. 
He who would learn these things must go 

Far in the forest, lone to pray, 
And follow well the sounds that flow 

From the church tower, far away." 



THE PREACHER AND HIS EXE MY. 173 

This is the mythical gray church against which the 
embittered enemy of the pastors of every name aims 
his poisoned but enfeebled arrows. To him walking 
through the great leafy and shady and silent wilder- 
ness the tower bells have no charm ; but the fight is 
an unequal one, and the victory will remain where it 
has always reposed — on the walls of the " old church 
gray." As Calvinism was only the peculiarity of a 
master mind, powerful enough to compel a following 
of weaker intellects, but a following to die away in 
more learned times ; as many dogmas have been only 
the view of the universe taken by an Edwards or a 
monk or an ascetic, so atheism as a philosophy is the 
eccentricity of a few minds, and will die away long 
before the mystery of the church bells will die out of 
the woods where we wander while we live, and at the 
roots of whose trees we shall all at last be buried. 
Thinking of the pastor's calling as reaching from 
Christ's own ministrations to the chapels of to-day 
that dot the earth from Persia to Oregon, estimating 
its labors and poverty and usefulness, the mind seems 
authorized to gaze into futurity and behold an era 
when the eloquence of atheism will from choice or 
compulsion pluck the fillets of fame from its temples 
and offer them to those toilers who in all the wide 
world are attempting to lead man, woman, and child 
to that mind and soul-freedom with which Christ 
makes free. 



XII. 
EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 



He hath made everything beautiful in its time. —Ecclesiastes iii: 1 1. 

Many years ago John Ruskin asked the readers of 
his volumes to detect and admire generic beauty — 
the beauty of special departments of life or nature or 
art. We must not compare the lion with the lamb or 
the eagle with the dove, but we must find a generic 
good in each class. Whether the person who com- 
posed the book of Ecclesiastes had this exact thought 
in mind it is impossible to determine, for the speaker 
is gone and the words are too condensed to be self- 
explanatory forever. He at least came very near ut- 
tering Mr. Ruskin's sentiment when sitting down 
amid the occupations and conditions of the old He- 
brew world, this old writer said : " God hath made 
everything beautiful in its time." Paul announced 
the same thought when he said : " There is one glory 
of the sun and another glory of the moon and another 
glory of the stars." From such condensed and sug- 
gestive statements from holy and common lips we 
may draw a lesson of the general equality of human 

(174) 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. I75 

condition amid its great variety. God hath made 
every condition beautiful in its time or place — beauti- 
ful in its own sphere. Notwithstanding the variety of 
human conditions each has its consolation and even 
its charm. 

In an age when there is a very general struggle for 
one position, that of riches, the lesson of the text 
should offer to us all a warning or a consolation or a 
reproof. We do not read human life broadly enough 
and do not live broadly enough and thus we shut up 
all the gates of happiness except one, and that one 
perhaps nature closed against us when we were 
created. Human life like the floral-energy or the 
rays of light has great aptitude for division and sub- 
division, and as flowers are small or large, red or 
pink or blue, and as light can resolve itself into a 
hundred hues and each one be a perfect color, so man 
can take one of many paths or many conditions and 
find in that island of being a noble application of his 
days and years. In order to fill up His infinite regions 
of space, the Creator has called into being almost in- 
numerable forms of existence and action, and in har- 
mony with this general plan the life of man was 
ordered to flow along many channels. There is no 
one path of greatness or success or happiness. There 
are as many beautiful shades of the human heart and 
mind as there are colors among the silks or sweet 



I76 EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 

changes on a chime of eight bells. Some great error 
has seized the multitude when they all struggle for 
one position. It is as though all flowers were strug- 
gling to become roses and all roses struggling to be- 
come red. 

The Creator has made variety to be one of the char- 
acteristics of His creation, but this variety would be 
a defect if there were there only one condition of ex- 
cellence. In that case all effort after variety would 
involve the loss of something good. If only the rose 
were beautiful all blossoms ought to have been roses, 
and if only the rich man or great mind can be happy 
it should have been ordered that all might be rich or 
great. If there is only one path that leads to ex- 
cellence, why is our world full of paths, and by divine 
command? The very fact of variety discloses the 
other fact that life has many conditions of equal honor 
and equal happiness, and that variety is a full partner 
of equality. There are not a hundred forms of right 
and wrong. There are a few eternal unities. All 
morals must agree in the idea of loving your neigh- 
bor as yourself. There is no display of variety 
around the law that man must not steal and must not 
lie and must not kill. In many places the universe 
marks out one formula for all places and all times, 
and stands by this formula with awful severity. But 
elsewhere the Creator loves all manners of variation, 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 177 

and in keeping with such a divine wish the physical 
and spiritual scenes are full of changes and are laden 
with changes to come, 

In the sphere of Christianity we may now look 
back and perceive that what the Church needed was 
uniformity of character, and not of idea or tenet. To 
be like Christ in heart and conduct should have been 
the aim of the early and later Church. All should 
have sought the unity of morals, of virtue and charity 
and hope, and then elsewhere to have enjoyed the 
exuberance and the diversified forms of thought. 
But of such a variegated landscape the early Church 
knew nothing, and to this day its successor has not 
moved wholly out of the follies of its youth. Augus- 
tine and Pelagius and Donatus, in their own persons 
or in their adherents, approached each other as hostile 
knights upon the field of battle. All three were one 
in love of the Master and in an effort to obey the 
moral law, but differing in some of the forms of 
thought they met as enemies, and after filling their 
times with an uproar they at last sprinkled their 
lands with blood. Great men in their period, they 
lacked that breadth of mind that can discern a unity 
beneath a variety. Able to read Greek and to read 
and write and speak the Latin, they had no more 
conception of the liberty and diversity and beauty of 

opinion than they had of a railway or a telegraph. 
12 



178 E Q UALITY IN VARIE TY. 

They were too small for the universe in which stood 
their homes. As little children led by their nurse to 
the bank of a wide river, will cast out stones or 
pebbles with a great effort and wonder that they do 
not go across, so these great men of the past stood 
by the great tide of life and fully expected to cast 
their arguments all over and through and through 
the minds and hearts of men. If they were not con- 
scious of failure we can see that they ought to have 
been filled with disappointment. Their arguments 
did not go across but fell at their feet 

Our age has reached a larger conception of the in- 
tellectual horizon but it is still too much injured by 
intolerance. This intolerance does not grow angry 
enough to heap up fagots or behead or imprison or 
banish, but it is powerful enough to limit the bounds 
of friendship and to mar the conduct and language of 
man toward man. There is still too much anxiety 
among those who hold what they call "views" that 
others should glory in the same ideas. But it must 
not be overlooked that this failure to perceive the 
breadth of the world is as common with the non-be- 
lieving as with the Christian, and as often bemeans an 
agnostic as a Baptist or a Presbyterian. Some of the 
bitterest and most intolerant of all letters which come 
to those who argue for the existence of a God come 
from men who have outgrown the narrow limits of a 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY, 179 

creed and who stand upon the sublime heights of 
nature. There is one height yet for many of these 
persons to master — that calm and holy summit which 
can enable them to look down in love and sympathy 
upon the opinions of a Christian. Opinions are the 
flowers of the intellectual world. Almost all of them 
are of fair color and of some delicate perfume. Only 
a few of the blossoms of the field are poisonous, and 
so in the vast empire of opinion nearly all can be worn 
on a pure heart or can be carried by those who are 
journeying toward Heaven. At least may we say 
there are many thoughts varying from each other 
which yet may and do all meet in one righteousness, 
and are equally pleasing in the sight of God. The 
quarrels of men over ideas are often as the disputes 
over the excellencies of different fabrics in the shops, 
or of styles of furniture or dress — matters of personal 
qualities and not of absolute merit or demerit in the 
external things. There are some minds which in 
music always listen to the bass and other minds 
which follow the soprano faithfully, but alas for the 
day when these persons shall attempt by sword or 
flame to determine which strain is the better. 

This equality found in variety is as much a fact 
away from theological matters as within them and 
rejoices to gather up into one merit many kinds of 
mind and many conditions of station or fame or 



1 80 E Q UALITY IN VARIE TV. 

property. There is a glory of the poet and another 
glory of the philosopher and a glory of the thinker 
and another glory of the artist and still another of 
the rich man and the poor man, for one man differs 
from another in the drapery of a beautiful being. All 
this rush forward toward the possession of wealth — a 
chase which it is thought characterizes our age — orig- 
inated in an ignorance of the absolute greatness of 
the human soul. The rich man is only one of a hun- 
dred shapes of a successful manhood. Assuming that 
one is making good use of his gold, and that he 
has a great store of it, this person is only one 
shape of prosperity. Not all can have abundant gold, 
for in that case gold would cease to be valuable and 
the wheels of industry would stop. Riches is a rela- 
tive term and can exist only where some have none 
of it. Riches is the measure by which the one over- 
tops the many. It is impossible therefore for even a 
majority to possess wealth, and to affirm therefore 
that wealth is the greatest aim of man would be to 
affirm that God leaves the most of His children with- 
out a motive of being; He has planned His world for 
the welfare of only a few. We must reverse our rea- 
soning and conclude from the fact that not many can 
reach riches, that it is only one peak in a mountain 
range, and that the most success of all forms will 
come from the innumerable multitude which move up 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. l8l 

higher heights. The mountain range is long. It 
sweeps across the world and if the millionaires were 
all to assemble upon one great summit, sunlit indeed 
and perhaps touched by the spirit of God, for among 
these there is many a noble philanthropist, yet would 
other summits and domes be visible, not one but 
many, and all covered with mortals robed in white 
and wearing crowns. So many are the heights access- 
ible to human footsteps that it is to be feared there 
will not be noblemen enough in this generation 
to furnish occupants for all these upper regions. 
In the pages of old history when some soldiers 
complained to their general that they feared that 
when the war were over he would not have the prop- 
erty nor the gratitude that would pay them for alt 
their toils, he replied that he had been wondering 
whether he would have enough friends to reward. 
Thus may we all affirm that there are more thrones 
of honor founded of God in this globe than there are 
kings and queens to sit upon them. The hills which 
have gold in their rock and sand are well trampled 
upon, but there is perhaps a great movement away 
from the Parnassus, so loved in the past, where assem- 
bled the poets, away from the groves and academies 
where the wise men talked and meditated, away from 
Zion once adorned by the Nazarene and his saints. 
It is said there is a great decline in the number of 



182 EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 

graduates who are fitting themselves for the field of 
religious service. If this decline were taking place 
only within the fold of orthodox belief we might 
affirm that the modern mind was protesting against 
the quality and quantity of tenets found in the creed, 
but it is said that Unitarian Churches cannot find shep- 
herds enough to care for their flocks. It thus seems 
that no form of Christianity is as attractive as once 
were all forms, and thus we are led by unwilling steps 
to the conclusion that the young hearts of to-day 
have become filled with the feeling that there is only 
one hill to be climbed and at its base they are all as- 
sembling. This is only a panic arising from a false 
alarm. A false cry in a school-house full of children 
will send the mass down stairs as rapidly and wildly, 
and with as much trampling and killing as though the 
danger were real. So among the excitable children 
of this century, millions will rush along trampling each 
other under foot, grinding and suffocating each other, 
in their wildness deserting many sacred things of 
learning or piety or art, and all this because some 
one has shouted aloud that wealth only is happiness. 
Never before was there a more fatal stampede over a 
deeper lie. The rush is down stairs narrow, and 
steep and long. The loss of life will be as great as 
foolish. 

What our age demands is a new study of generic 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. I 83 

beauty — beauty of a single kind. Did the merciful 
Creator give you a bright intellect and a warm heart ? 
Then you have your destiny in yourself, and that mind 
is all the fortune you should want. It is more than 
you can take good care of. Realizing its worth from 
youth onward, you might at the age of forty make a 
millionaire look at you with envy. Many a man of 
fortune is now lamenting that he did not love his 
mind more in past years, and he now would exchange 
his riches for the power to compose a speech or a 
poem or an essay. 

The philosopher, the thinker, the skilled artist, the 
musician, the preacher, the essayist, the historian, the 
poet, has each his destiny in his own pursuit. He 
has his share of the universe, and his piece is as large 
and rich as that of Croesus or Caesar. The rich are 
not better than the common throng, they are simply 
different. At least this is true to a degree greatly 
overlooked in our generation. Some one comes to 
you and asks which is the greatest of human composi- 
tions ? And you are amazed at the question, for you 
cannot compare Homer with Lord Bacon, nor Dante 
with Isaac Newton, nor Shakspeare with Guizot and 
Castelar. You must classify before you can compare, 
and you must compare before you can award honors. 
Separating the poets from the other forms of mind 
you may then weigh Homer as against Virgil or 



I84 EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 

Dante, and detaching the causists you may compare 
Calvin and Fox or Mill and Puffendorf, and thus you 
may compare the rich men with each other and may 
affirm that Croesus was less wealthy than some mod- 
ern Aurum or Argent; but the moment you pass from 
one class to another comparison ceases from want of 
any resemblance. 

The man who composed the song of Home, Sweet 
Home, so touched all those hearts that have ever sat 
around the fireside of early life that after thirty years 
of gathering appreciation and gratitude, the entombed 
bones of the poet become sacred and are brought back 
from a distant land that they too may be at home. 
Thus the glory of Croesus is one, and the glory of 
Payne is another. One man dazzles us by his mill- 
ions, but the other draws tears with his song. To 
these differences of value there is no visible or logical 
end. They are as infinite as the species of plants. 
As on the banks of the river of life, as seen in John's 
vision, there grew twelve manner of fruits, and as there 
fell new ripe fruit each month, so the trees of fame 
and happiness are as numerous as are the stars, and 
their ripe fruit falls in all the days and hours of man's 
career. Sit down by any of the many greater callings 
of our world and you will soon be carried away by its 
greatness. When you hear a great, honorable lawyer 
speak, do you not for the hour feel that you would 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 185 

love to have his form of learning and his form of 
power? Out of the court-room and in the studio of 
the artist a new desire comes that you could express 
yourself upon canvas; listening to a musician you 
wish you could recall wasted days and make them 
bring you the skill of piano or violin. But passing 
years will check these longings by a slow overwhelm- 
ing process which will compel you at last to say* 
11 The universe is too large for me. I shall love my 
handful of flowers since I cannot carry the whole 
field. The whole spring-time is too large for me. I 
shall simply walk forth into a part of its sunshine." 

Each thing is beautiful in its time. The perfect 
wood-work of the carpenter, the strong iron-work of 
the smith, the carved marble of the sculptor, the 
August fields of the farmer, the cloth of the weaver, 
the school of the master, the quiet room of the student, 
the college with its turrets, the cottage with its holly- 
hocks and vines, all come with their separate charm 
and help compose the magnificence of the world. In 
the thrilling page of history the poverty of the learned 
is seen now to be as grand as the gold of the mer- 
chant or the estates of royalty. We do not feel that 
Socrates needed riches and we are glad that Jesus 
Christ had nothing but a soul. The isolation of his 
soul made it stand forth like white figures upon a 
dark background. His soul reposes upon poverty 
like a rainbow upon a cloud. 



1 86 EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 

It has been nearly a half hundred years since some 
kind minds began to ask for woman all the occupa- 
tions and pursuits and the form of education common 
to man. In an age full of sympathy and full of ap- 
preciation of woman, this reform, if we may give it 
such a name, advances but slowly. Great changes 
should indeed be made, great laws of equity should be 
passed, and the day should be toiled for which should 
announce one morals for all the members of society, 
but the exact equalization of woman and man will long 
be delayed by the wide feeling that there are two 
destinies here, and that the glory of man is one and 
the glory of woman another. They are different parts 
of the great creation of God. Neither is superior to 
the other any more than Homer is superior to Lord 
Bacon, or than Angelo is superior to Washington. 
With what comparison can we compare Paul or John 
with Mary or Beatrice? The harsh old world did 
make a comparison and decided that man was the 
chief personage in rational being, and woman was re- 
manded to a bondage from which she has not fully 
escaped ; but if to escape from this crime we should 
assume the identity, mental and spiritual, of these two 
classes, we should again sin, this time against that law 
of nature which has filled up all space with diversity. 
From the old wrong against women we should fly to 
a new wrong against the Creator, just how near the 



EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 187 

studies and pursuits of the sister may approach those 
of her brother it is difficult to state in detail, but our 
thought begins and ends with the feeling that God 
has marked out different paths for these different feet, 
and that to compel them to march in one road is a 
wrong to both of the pilgrims. A grander vision is 
it to look out and behold two continents in the ocean 
of life, upon the one the stupendous structures reared 
by man, upon the other the more spiritual and more 
divine works wrought by the hand of woman. These 
kingdoms are simply different from each other, nei- 
ther being the greater or the less. Rising up in two 
forms they double the beauty of the whole scene. To 
blend woman into man would be to blot out a world. 
Woman has not yet found her calling to the full ; she 
is still halting amid things of small import or of much 
evil, but when she shall find her " lost mission " it will 
prove to be something very different from the destiny 
of true manhood. There will appear a perfect equality 
but it will exist in the midst of diversity. 

What an improved earth should we have could each 
honorable condition realize that it is a part of a divine 
plan, that riches and honorable poverty, fame and no 
fame, genius and common intellect, high professions 
and industrial arts are all parts of the one great sym- 
phony — the eternal music of God's spheres. As in 
time so in immortality there will be room for all 



I 88 EQUALITY IN VARIETY. 

through whose soul there runs here one common 
gold thread of righteousness or innocence. In that 
still, inner life the infant who went early from this 
world and the sage who went late, the Christian who 
went to his grave in much light and the pagan who 
went in much darkness, the mind which died amid 
learning in the schools and the slave who died in 
ignorance in his cabin, can all find a welcome in the 
hereafter ; for if earth in its littleness had room for so 
many forms of soul, much more can the greater country 
beyond the grave offer to all these exiles a befitting 
home. As God is Himself infinite, He has stamped 
that sublime term upon all His works, and upon no 
object more deeply than upon the soul of man. 



XIII. 
REASON AND IMAGINATION. 



And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. — Rev. xxi : I. 

It seems the privilege of man, not to dogmatize 
over the unseen things of the universe but to med- 
itate over them, and if he is so disposed, to venture 
upon conjecture. The mind, when forbidden actual 
knowledge, is wont to busy itself with probabilities 
and possibilities, and from these it can draw comfort 
and happiness if not information. The notorious Dr. 
Dick, whose writings formed the average family 
library of the second quarter of our century, imagined 
the punishment of the lost to consist largely in an 
isolation of the wicked from all communion with 
nature. They were in darkness perpetual, unable to 
look out toward a sun or moon or blue sky. In the 
midst of everlasting cloud they were to pass endless 
years, and because of that darkness came the wailing 
and gnashing of teeth. His theory has this value: 
it asks us to ponder over the immense amount of 
happiness that comes to us all from the freedom, the 

(i8 9 ) 



1 90 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

intellectual range of the mind. It is true that after 
gazing at the stars or the planets we still know little 
about them, but it is a measureless delight to be able 
to look at them as they are, though they are only 
bright spots in the sky. No feeling is more oppres- 
sive than that of imprisonment. The soul contains a 
form of personal infinity and, to be content, must feel 
that all is open between it and the stars. Man may, 
from curiosity or love of variety, enter a deep cavern 
or descend into the deep crater of a volcano, but the 
happiest moment is that which sees him back again to 
resume his relations to the immensity of space. The 
dawn of day is made more sweet by the fact, that 
night is a form of imprisonment and morning is the 
opening of the doors and an escape into liberty — the 
liberty of light and space. 

The soul having been constructed upon this liberal 
principle it inherited the right to form ideas and con- 
jectures over what may lie beyond the confines of all 
its sciences. It cannot by any means determine what 
is heaven or what is hell, nor what may be the con- 
dition of things upon the surface of Mars or Jupiter or 
Venus, but it may, it must, continue to make argu- 
ments of approximation, and thus to take a few steps 
of imagination into those lands whose gates are closed 
against the, men of science, however gifted and ad- 
venturous. It is not wholly to the credit of our period, 



REASON AND IMA GINA TION. I 9 1 

that speculation regarding things beyond our horizon 
and beyond the grave has fallen into great unpopu- 
larity, for such a deadness and silence may indicate 
not a simple reaction against such imposture as the 
old church played upon our ancestors, and partly up- 
on us, but may indicate a decline of that imagination 
which not only wrought in the domain of religion, 
but which helped construct all the old poetry and the 
old arts. It is well enough to crush all of that old 
fancy which the Church once thought the voice of in- 
spiration, and whose dreams it formulated into doc- 
trines, but it is not well to destroy all the imagination 
of the soul, and thus to cut down the tree which 
needed only to be grafted and trimmed. The sweet 
orange groves of the South are made out of those 
trees which once bore bitter fruit, and the rich de- 
licious olives come from old wild stocks whose great 
utility and powers science has turned along the paths 
of a better fruitage. Thus that religious imagination 
and affection which bore such bitter fruit as fell in the 
middle ages could be employed in our era in growing 
for us new children, better oranges and olives than 
those from even the orchards of Dante and Milton. 
Our period has cultivated the absolute and material 
to such a degree that we fear that instead of grafting 
the old tree of imagination, it has cut it down as a 
cumberer of the ground, and has sown with wheat and 
corn the field where it grew. 



I92 REASON AND IMAGINATION 

Toward such a desecration of holy grounds the 
scientists have lent a helping hand, for it is now about 
a hundred years since they began to attract us into 
their shops, that we might see things measured and 
weighed and formed and dissolved, and that we might 
learn how much bread and meat were consumed in 
the composition of an oration and a poem, and what 
food would turn most readily into the argument of a 
statesman or a lawyer. Emerging from those lessons 
we find our old poetry displaced by figures and quan- 
tities, and the map of heaven put away to make room 
for the sections of land for sale in Dakota or Ne- 
braska. Not all the reproach of such a change must 
fall upon the scientists, because they are themselves 
a result of a past which made the imagination a tyrant 
who formed laws and theologies out of his fancies, 
and who put men to death for a non-belief of his fan- 
tasies. The absurd fancy of the past taken in con- 
nection with its superstition and arrogance was indeed 
more to be deplored than the modified materialism of 
to-day. If one were compelled to choose be- 
tween the mind of a Herbert Spencer full of calcula- 
tions and weights and measures, and a mind which 
would throw an inkstand at a devil or hang a poor 
woman for bewitching a family, one would ask in- 
stantly for the soul of Spencer, for one would better 
escape the happiness of imagination than be guilty of 
its bloody crimes. 



REASON AND IMA GIXA TION. 193 

The benevolence of the Creator lias delivered us 
from such a dilemma, for He offers us the full privi- 
lege of following both science and imagination, and 
of asking them both to help us construct our moral 
world. It is our own error and folly if we become 
the slaves of either materialism or of fancy. Science 
— all pure reason — is not the destroyer of poetry and 
dream, but only their best friend; the one ready to 
check dogmatism and fanaticism and absurdity, and 
to point out to the religious dreamer the best path for 
his winged feet. Homer and Virgil and Shakespeare 
are instances of the poet's acting in partnership with 
reason. The ends and aims of these great poets are 
the actual and good in human life, and their poetic 
imagery and often extravagance are only the innocent 
but beautiful ornaments of their w T ork ; but the imag- 
inative faculty of the middle ages, and of times reach- 
ing to the Salem witchcraft was an end and aim in 
itself, and it shed human blood like a maniac mother 
who murders her children. What poetry may remain 
in our age or may come to it is or is to be modified by 
reason, and is indeed to be composed out of the law r - 
ful inferences of the deepest science, and the deepest 
logic. Noble condition of intellectual development 
will that be when science and poetry shall be com- 
bined ! When each mind shall ask the known to help 

it soar away to the unknown! Looking into the fire 
13 



1 94 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

the heart will muse, or while musing the fire within 
will burn, and the heart will pass far away from its 
little cottage or narrow calling of the day, and be an 
inhabitant of the broader country of God. In devel- 
oping his reason, perhaps man was compelled to slight 
his sentiments, because to rescue his reason from the 
mire of the past was a Herculean task. To accom- 
plish such a task, and bring common sense back to 
humanity, he had to omit all else of pleasure and duty ; 
but now that reason is restored, perhaps the modern 
nations will return and bring back the forgotten poetry, 
and thus make a grand age out of the two infinite 
powers — logic and dream. Not only had imagination 
become injured by the long accretions of folly and 
terror and superstition, but to the same degree the 
reasoning principle had become weak from disuse, and 
the most intelligent part of the human race suffered 
under a bad judgment and a bad creative faculty. It 
will be a stupendous task to bring back these de- 
throned kings, and set them up in empires over which 
they shall reign in harmony. Not only reason can be 
dethroned, but such a fate can befall a noble fancy. 
Agnosticism, so popular, is not more an expression 
of irreligion than of the bondage of the age to the ex- 
act letter of demonstration. It is Shylock invading 
the sanctuary. He exacts the last penny of truth. If 
you suggest any equivalents, any equities, he smiles 



REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 1 9 5 

his sickly smile of victory and demands the exact 
proof. He exults in his power over the timid victim, 
Faith. The victim from her nature shrinks, and is 
dumb in presence of a foe so relentless. So much of 
human happiness and human greatness comes from 
inferences and probabilities and possibilities, that to 
give up a God and a heaven because you cannot per- 
fectly demonstrate their realness, is to sell out the 
soul at a low price. It seems an uncalled for removal 
from a rich vale to a desert, on the assumption that in 
the desert no one will ever dispute the title to your 
few acres of burning sand. True! should a man 
stake out a small farm in the midst of Sahara, he 
would not soon be called upon to prove up a title, but 
all this peace would proclaim the barrenness of the 
soil. One would rather live in a vale so rich with 
fruits and grains and flowers, as to be at least worthy 
of an inquiry, and perhaps of a warm debate. Ag- 
nosticism is an effort to find rest by pitching tent in 
a desert, where the security of title rests chiefly in the 
worthlessness of the land. Its votaries are men with- 
out any trace of imagination ; men incapable of enjoy- 
ing a probability; men who have not risen above 
poetry, but who have fallen beneath it. 

Naturalists will tell us that our domestic fowls 
were once birds of long wing and great flight; but 
that, as food was placed by man within easy reach, 



1 96 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

and shelter was furnished them in winter, they dis- 
continued all wish of migration and their wings grew 
shorter, and their bodies heavier, and now they are 
the victims of a narrower policy, and are the idle and 
clumsy occupants of a few square rods of ground. 
Men and birds belong to the same dispensation of law, 
and if we are each generation becoming more and 
more unable to fly toward the mysterious blue of 
heaven, perhaps such a result comes from the fact 
that some kind of food has been flung down, so much 
and so pleasant, that the soul's wings have lost power 
to wander, and we have become the occupants of a 
door-yard rather than of the upper deep. Materialism 
has domesticated us until the mind no longer dreams 
of eternity. An agnostic may be a soul domesticated 
out of its immortality. 

But it may be too soon yet to find what peculiar 
shape of mind that is which abandons the glory of 
a God and the hope of paradise, for the phase of 
thought is new; it has not fully expressed itself as to 
the condition of heart it loves. We dare offer only 
conjecture; and one may well fear, that this willing- 
ness to surrender all spiritual things comes not from 
a new majesty of reason, but from a decline of the 
glowing power of poetry and imagination, and a gen- 
eral stagnation of the heart. It will, without much 
doubt, disclose itself as being at last one of those sub- 



REASON AND IMA GINA TION. \ gy 

mergencies in history in which we see one continent 
of the soul sink under a wave to make more conspicu- 
ous another great domain of its vast world. In Greece, 
Stoicism came with its suppression of one continent 
and its upheaval of another. Some iron laws of duty- 
arose, laws toward man and state ; but as much glory 
of life went down on the one hand as arose on the 
other. This stoicism passed over to Rome to be re- 
duced to a still harder rule of conduct and endurance. 
It had some traces of beauty, but in its teachings the 
soul was like the moon behind clouds — able to send 
forth only traces of its complete splendor. Epicurean- 
ism came as a second depression of much and an 
exaltation of much. Its inquiry was always for hap- 
piness ; the Stoic delighted in a peaceful endurance, 
the Epicurean in a constant enjoyment. The Church, 
coming into the arena to displace the classic pagan- 
ism, ran off into various excesses and filled up about 
twelve centuries with an asceticism narrower and 
more false than the teachings of Stoic or Epicurean. 
It was an awful eclipse of body and mind. Christians 
were made saints by reducing their minds to imbe- 
cility and their bodies to skeletons. Those were 
generations without poetry or song or romance or 
health or happiness. 

Agnosticism is one more strange specialization of 
the mind. It says, "Let us feed upon the tangible, 



1 9 8 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

the visible, the ponderable. Let us no longer imagine 
a God or a second life. Let us part company with 
the whole realm of probability ; and form an alliance 
with facts. We shall dispense with hymn and 
prayer, and make the best use of what is, asking 
nothing of what might possibly occur." Such a phi- 
losophy seems a cutting of the soul asunder, to fling 
away the part that dreams and imagines and hopes 
and longs. It will need to draw its adherents from 
persons of peculiar mental structure, and it is barely 
possible that our age is fitting its youth for a life with- 
out those longings which inspired all the great chil- 
dren of the past. But it seems more probable, that 
this attempt to eliminate the eternal and the infinite 
from man will be an extravaganza of thought — an 
event as probable among philosophers as among actors 
and humorists and musicians. 

It does not seem a matter of doubt that the im- 
agination of man was expected to supply many of the 
defects of sensible proofs, and to draw inferences 
from the actual, to put foliage upon the barren 
boughs fashioned by a severer logic. After the 
sciences have shown the unity of the universe — the 
universal presence of one method — after the spectrum 
analysis has helped teach us that the planets and the 
suns are made of the same elements which compose 
our earth, we are compelled to feel that in many 



REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 1 99 

worlds there is life, and that the intelligent and loving 
creature, man, is to-day dwelling in many a globe be- 
sides this one we love. The vastness of the universe 
renders foolish the supposition that this little planet 
is the only inhabited one ; and the unity of laws and 
of substances asks us to imagine the beings upon 
other spheres to be moving to and fro in the likeness 
of man, speaking a language and busied by the useful 
and the beautiful. We may even assume that such is 
the oneness of intelligent life that if these inhabitants 
of different planets were to meet in some general 
home in immortality, they would prove to be of one 
race — a human race having different minor details of 
history, but all members of one brotherhood, and 
capable of one friendship, one virtue, one taste, one 
piety — ten thousand worlds full of one music, one art, 
one tenderness, one virtue, one creature — man — one 
God. 

Immortality itself is not against the discoveries of 
science, but is rather a corollary following its long and 
careful demonstration. The infinite longings of man, 
the horror of death, the matchless glory of life, the 
loathsomeness of the grave, the boundlessness of 
truth, the happiness its discovery brings, the inad- 
equacy of three-score-years as compared with what 
the mind might learn or do or enjoy, the littleness of 
earth as compared with the creation, man's imprison- 



200 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

ment, the presence and power of imagination and 
hope, these are all facts as palpable as the facts of 
land and air and water. Out of these tremendous 
realities a second life rises up, as not an intellectual 
fabrication, but as an inference drawn by imagination 
acting under the guidance of logic. Not to infer 
a second life is to be more irrational than to infer one, 
because such refusal to look forward is to blindfold 
man and make him barter away the infinite and re- 
ceive a prison in exchange. Poetry, romance, hope, 
inference, are giant powers in the human career, and 
have come down to us covered all over with honors 
richer than the decorations of kings. To ask man 
not to look away toward a God, and not to cast his 
eye toward anything beyond the hour of death, is not 
to be a student of nature, but it is to be an enemy of 
nature; since that nature, so worshiped, formed the 
mind and heart for an infinite outlooking. It is one 
of the blunders of modern naturalists that they do not 
conclude any phenomena natural except those of 
water and dirt, and no sentiment reasonable unless it 
be one of despair. They rush into the theatre of man 
and put out the lights in the first act, because of in- 
adequate proof that the piece is going to be great. If 
after death these should learn that man came from a 
God and has a sublime destiny, it would be too late 
for them to advise us to order up the curtain again 



REASON AND IMA GIN A TION. 201 

and go on with the majestic drama. No greater 
enemy of reason has ever appeared than this new pro- 
fessed friend. It asks us to exchange the infinite 
for the finite, a sublime poetry for a few facts, and the 
great summer-time of the soul for a brief period of 
cold and storm. 

Reason separated from a warm imagination may be 
useful in that kind of ability which comes from con- 
centration upon a single object of toil. Hence Zeno, 
Socrates, Seneca, Epictetus, Aurelius, a'Kempis, 
Pascal, Harriet Martineau, and John Stuart Mill were 
of great usefulness to the human family, for from them 
came many lessons in a noble ethics ; but they were 
special toilers and passed life under deep clouds. 
They helped unveil a half of the universe, but the 
other half they left under the empire of night. They 
were all destitute of that buoyancy of soul which has 
made for humanity its art, its music, its song, its 
laughter, its love, its worship and its hopes. We are 
glad they all lived and toiled, but we are glad also 
that others lived also to cover the naked trees with 
foliage, their outline world with green grass and 
sweet flowers. Logic without passion cannot make a 
world. 

If science and reason have stalked into the new 
scene in stature greater than old life, each as colossal 
as the Moses of Angelo, the sacred imagination of 



202 REASON AND IMA GINA TION. 

religion need not hide away in alarm, but she too 
must aspire to a new height and beauty; and disrob- 
ing herself of the morbid rags of the past, those gar- 
ments covered with pictures of fiends — vestments of 
death worn by victims of the inquisition on the way to 
the pile of fagots — she must put on diviner raiment, 
woven by tenderer toilers at looms, and with threads 
of finer silk, and must rise as colossal in beauty as 
reason is colossal in power. If science and reason are 
laying better foundations of thought, let imagination 
hasten and build upon these better stones a better 
temple of God, and make it tremble with a still holier 
music, and resound with a wider and more rational 
eloquence. Not afraid of this gigantic reason, let 
this exalted poetry of the soul extend to reason one 
hand, and holding it in friendship, point with the other 
to the sky ; for demonstration and imagination, acting 
in harmony, can find the truest answer to the prob- 
lems of human life. 



XIV. 
THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION, 



In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. — Gen, 
i: i. 

The doctrine of evolution is now enjoying a day 
of popularity. At times it seems on the wane, as 
though it were proving itself unable to satisfy the 
mind — much less the heart. In other months its 
star seems again a rising star, as though its zenith 
had not yet been reached. The espousal of the 
new doctrine by the most popular and most power- 
ful clergymen of our country is destined to add a 
new impulse to these vague theories which agree in 
the one effect of concealing the presence of a God. 
It is true that evolution does not absolutely exclude 
God, but it introduces so many natural agencies 
that many minds rise from its contemplation with a 
feeling that these agents have displaced their em- 
ployer, and are toiling in their own name. Quite a 
number of men of considerable learning and mental 
power have already declared that they are not aware 
of the existence of any such being as God. Not 

(203) 



204 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

ready to deny such an Existence, they confess that 
they are to be influenced only by the phenomena of 
society, and must find their laws of conduct in all 
temporary interests. That these leaders are being 
followed by a large number of minds who are hidden 
away in the factory, the shop, and the fields, is well 
known to be true. The doctrine once laughed at, 
the doctrine once answered by calling the monkey 
the ancestor of at least philosophers, has outlived the 
laugh, and engages the most serious attention of the 
learned and unlearned. 

This serious and almost universal attention and 
respect are, however, no proof that the new theory 
is to be accepted; but they come from the change 
undergone by the public in relation to all new an- 
nouncements in any department of human inquiry. 
Once all new ideas were received with derision, but 
such amazing new truths have sprung up within this 
century that men have grown respectful, and spirit- 
ualism and evolution and even atheism are treated 
with a public politeness. Men are afraid to laugh for 
they remember what recent history has taught nations 
and individuals, that "he laughs best who laughs 
last." In our times, the attention which evolution is 
receiving is not an indication of its reasonableness ; 
but it is only a proof that the human family has 
moved up out of that self-conceit which once ex- 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 20$ 

eluded all possibility of error, and which made the 
holding of new opinions a sin, punishable often with 
death. 

To this question whether man was evolved from 
the lowest form of life, there is another side. Evolu- 
tion has its objections, material and spiritual. Some 
of the great men in science dispute its claims, and 
those who are now pondering over the problem of 
life should keep in mind the objections as well as the 
arguments in favor of the gradual construction of 
man. Mr. Beecher can harmonize the theory with 
religion more easily than he can harmonize it with 
scientific facts. A personal and good God might in- 
deed have seen fit to create or produce man through 
a thousand intervening creatures, and man thus pro- 
duced might at last have become religious; but the 
facts of science do not blend with the assumed situa- 
tion as readily as does a more facile religion. 

Darwin and Spencer and their schools are urged 
onward by their full conviction in the universality and 
persistence of law. With them the persistence of 
force takes the place of the old dogma about the per- 
severance of the saints. It was the comfort of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries that the elect could 
not, by any power of temptation or crime, be deprived 
of final salvation. Onward toward Paradise they must 
go, led or impelled by " irresistible grace." The other 



206 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION-. 

name for this onward march was "effectual calling." 
It has died away from religion to spring up in science, 
and " persistent force" is the name of this agency 
which hurls animal life along from slime to cell and 
from cell to vertebrae — from brute to man. But a 
survey of the facts of nature does not reveal any such 
never-resting law ; for if, as most naturalists admit, the 
human race has been on this globe fifty or more 
thousands of years, the forces which formed man and 
the animals around man have enjoyed a wonderful 
period of rest, so far as any transmuting of genera 
is concerned. Man, when he made rude images on 
the surface of old ivory, or when he made tools of 
stone, was just what he now is in all the essentials of 
a unique creature. He had then imagination, fancy, 
invention of tools and a love of the beautiful ; and the 
vertebrate animals around him were as perfect as they 
are to-day. The brutes have made no progress and 
man no progress by any law of force in all that fifty 
thousand years. What advance man has made in 
that vast period has not been caused by any physical 
laws of which science takes note, but has been made 
by means of school-house or meditation — things 
which do not belong to what are called forces ; for if 
there were forces which tended to produce meditation, 
the mammoth ought to have learned in fifty thousand 
years to make a few letters or images upon his own 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 207 

tusks, or upon the tusk of his next friend. It is a 
singular situation that the evolutionists trace man 
back fifty thousand years by the unchanging works of 
his mind, and trace the cave -deer and cave-bear back 
just as far by the unchanging qualities of bear and 
deer, and then infer from that long separation and iso- 
lation of genera the variations of genera and species. 
To infer changes from constancy is a new form of 
reasoning. 

The marks of constancy are as numerous in our 
earth as are the traces of change. Go back to the 
cave-men who may have lived a hundred thousand 
years ago, and they stood no nearer the ape than we 
all stand to-day. They carved upon pieces of ivory 
pictures of the hairy elephant and of animals whose 
remains are found in the formations of the quater- 
nary period ; and thus man, lying in death among 
those animals, with his stone implements around 
him, and with his rude engravings by his side, 
assures us that there he was in France and Switzer- 
land, with his lofty mind, fifty or sixty thousand 
years ago. His implements, his carvings, his bears 
and elephants are now his historians. Thus are 
revealed great pauses in what is called natural, per- 
sistent force, spaces of vast extent, during which no 
changes are taking place in any of the genera of 
earth, higher or lower. 



208 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

It weighs against the evolution theory that the 
changes found in the historic periods are all wrought 
within the boundaries of a genus, and not in the 
wider kingdom of life. One genus will furnish many- 
varieties of species, but one genus has never been 
seen passing over to become another. The variety 
of dogs is immense, and points back toward the 
wolf; but the dog does not threaten ever to pass out 
of the genus, and become a member of the genus 
bovine or the equine family. So the variety of 
horses is very great. What a wonderful collection 
we find between the great, heavy animals painted by 
Rosa Bonheur and the little ponies from the Shetland 
Islands ! But in all this spirit of variation, marked 
in all history, there is no tendency in the horse to 
pass over to the kingdom of the lion or the elk or 
the bear. The variety of tame pigeons is also very 
large, but this tendency to change size and color and 
decoration limits itself within the species, and never 
carries the pigeon toward the hawk or the owl. 
Thus, while rabbits are multiplying their colors, they 
are never moving toward anything else, but are 
always the same timid essential rabbit. In the floral 
world, the rose has branched off into a hundred 
shapes and colors and perfumes, but the rose and the 
sunflower are as far apart as they were when man 
first heard of them, and both of these are equally far 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 209 

from the moss below them and the oak above them. 
Much as we all admire and esteem Mr. Beecher, he 
is more of a popular orator than at least was our 
Agassiz. Agassiz was all his life a student of the 
facts of nature ; and after making a survey of all the 
variations of animals and birds and fishes, he was 
compelled to say that he could find no evidence of an 
evolution of one class from another. His words are: 
" There is nothing like parental descent connecting 
them. The fishes of the Palaeozoic age are in no 
respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary 
age ; nor does man descend from the animals which 
preceded him in the Tertiary period. The link by 
which they are connected is of a higher and immate- 
rial nature, and their connection is to be sought in 
the wish of the Creator himself." 

There is much demand made for the " missing 
link" between ape and man, but that call is not the 
one-tenth part of the difficulty in the argument of 
evolution. We want thousands of " links " to join 
not only man to the ape- world, but to connect all the 
modern animals with the oyster and mollusk. Great 
use is made by evolutionists of vast periods of time. 
'' Give us millions of years for our task." If, then, all 
their agencies must act in long time, those "missing 
links " did not act hastily, and the animals between 

man and the monkey must have been the partakers 
14 



210 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

of these long periods. There must have been vast 
numbers of those animals which attached man to the 
ape, and they must have been upon earth a long 
time. Under the lead of the evolutionists we must 
believe that earth will preserve anything except the 
bones or impress of a " link." It will preserve the 
ape and the man, but it cherishes some ill-will toward 
a " link," and refuses them any kind of immortality. 
Nature will preserve things delicate as a fern leaf or 
the little fishes that swam long before the mammalia 
appeared, but it has issued a decree of perfect oblivion 
against all " links " and asks us to write over them 
the word " missing." This we do cheerfully, and 
feel that there is a good reason for absence of their 
remains in death — the absence of their organisms from 
old life. These " links " now missing could not have 
made a short stay of a few years, for evolution de- 
mands long times ; nor could the ancestors of man 
have possessed a pulpy body that would not 
remain as a fossil ; for so gradual are the assumed 
processes of evolution that the ancestors of man must 
have possessed the substantial bones of the higher 
order of animals and should have left some remains. 
The absence of " links " and the isolation and perfec- 
tion of all the old species, are facts which may well 
call us to halt awhile before we dispense with the suc- 
cessive wishes and acts of an intelligent Creator. 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 211 

It would be pure dogmatism to declare the evolu- 
tion theory false or impossible, for the case is one of 
such magnitude that we are invited to think rather 
than to exult in mere declaration ; but this remark ap- 
plies as well to those who espouse the doctrine as to 
those who reject it. Up to this date much of the 
popular faith in this new theory results from the 
courage and bold assumption of its advocates in the 
fields of science; for it is becoming an evident truth 
that in the power to speak like an oracle the theologian 
is fully equaled by the scientist. The terms of the 
old theologian were but little less lucid than the terms 
of the modern evolutionist. The words " force/' 
"magnetism," " persistent force," " potency," parade 
before us in all the mystery of those days which ut- 
tered such words as " fate " and M free-will " and " three- 
in-one" and " eternal procession." Both these sets of 
names are apparent efforts of the mind to find points 
where its knowledge may fade away into ignorance 
in a manner elegant and gentle. When found in a 
fog, man names the fog and it becomes a part of his 
science. 

It is now objected to the doctrine of evolution that 
it has been imposing upon us and upon itself by its use 
of the term " force." In a sermon of a few weeks ago 
upon the "Moral Element in Creation," the ground 
was taken that forces in nature could not prefer a 



212 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

" survival of the fittest/' for natural forces possess no 
taste of a moral quality, and the " potency of life " 
could not make man love the perfume of a rose or a 
painted sunset. Instead of placing God simply fur- 
ther back, this idea of persistent force seems to fail 
wholly along its pathway. It not only fails to pro- 
duce certain much needed " links," but it fails to ex- 
plain any plant or animal that has come or which 
may yet appear. Force may hold together particles 
of material and make them assume the form of a 
rain-drop or even of a planet, but there must be some- 
thing added before any of the dynamics of nature can 
make particles of material arrange themselves into a 
tree or a bird or a man. You make no gain by call- 
ing it "persistent force " ; for if the force which holds 
the particles of lead together should continue to act 
for a million years, it could never make that lead take 
root and grow, or take lungs and breathe. These 
terms have been permitted to blind all us non-scientific 
souls until at last we have come to believe that force 
can achieve a wonderful end in making animals if 
only we grant it plenty of time. We are asked to be- 
lieve that force loves the final end in man more than it 
loves the intermediate end in ape and bird and tree. 

In " The British Review " of last month, a writer of 
great acuteness calls attention to the fact that after all 
said about " forces" by Darwin and Herbert Spencer, 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 213 

they will not find in any such term any assistance in 
constructing the organic kingdoms, for the question 
will be : What is it that determines the direction 
force shall take ? The question is not one of power, 
but of guided power. Two ideas must meet to make 
up the effective "potency." The writer illustrates by 
saying that power will dissolve a sand-bank and make 
the soil flow away from the flint or gold, or will shat- 
ter a stone or melt a snow-drift, but power will never 
form an organized body — a bird or a tree or a rose, 
because that formation is power guided to a special 
end and asks for a second element. 

Such a setting aside of the word so dear to the 
friends of evolution will not utterly destroy their 
theory, but it does cast upon them the necessity of 
confessing that they need a second element of power ; 
something that will guide power, and they ought to 
confess that they have been imposing upon the com- 
mon people by the false use of a term. The term did 
not contain all the causation the evolutionists were 
making use of in their new mode of genesis. The 
force of wind will carry a ship, and it is true enough 
to state that the breeze was a "persistent force" 
which brought the bark or schooner to our harbor; 
but the remark is not fully true, for the wind would, 
if left to itself, have sent the vessel on the shore at 
any one of a hundred points. Force, therefore, does 



214 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

not bring our shipping into this particular harbor. 
The potency is guided force — something so different 
as to change the whole phase of evolution. Our ani- 
mals and birds and trees and blossoms are, therefore, 
not the results of forces, but of forces under a guid- 
ance. 

Evolution, therefore, as viewed by Professor Clif- 
ford, and so many who, by means of it, displace a 
God, is a form of imposition upon the public, an im- 
position in the shape of extracting more from " power " 
than lies in the term. The breeze which will waft a 
ship in a general way is made by them to select a par- 
ticular harbor, and to lay the vessel up quietly and 
gently at the dock. 

Such are the objections which rest against the 
theory of evolution held in either its religious form, 
by the most of its friends, or in its atheistic form by 
the fewest. All that is made certain by research is 
that great varieties of life have come within the bor- 
ders of a genus, but the genera all stand yet as the 
result of some cause that can determine and plan and 
guide. James Croll, an English writer, quoting from 
some one whose name he does not mention, but one 
who has abandoned the belief in any Creator, intro- 
duced these words : 

"The theory of theism in any shape is, scientifically 
considered, superfluous .... and I am not 



THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 215 

ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of 
God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness, 
and when at times I think, as think at times I must, of 
the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of 
that creed which once was mine and the lonely mys- 
tery of existence as now I find it, I shall ever feel it 
impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my 
nature is susceptible." Words these, which lead us 
all no doubt to marvel at the ease with which some 
minds part with their most sacred opinions, and how 
ready they seem to be to move away from the " hal- 
lowed glory of a creed " and " to wander in the lonely 
mystery of existence." Our own horizon has j ust pre- 
sented us with this premature spectacle of moving 
away from a hallowed creed, and hurrying into a 
lonely mystery. An actor died wishing no religious 
service or allusion ; a fellow actor read over the coffin 
some dreamy words of annihilation, and a leader in 
this spiritual abandon telegraphed for the funeral 
some words of kindness and dust mingled. Thus 
three forms are seen bending in a melancholy worship 
of oblivion. All one can say is that what sadness 
they reveal is as yet uncalled for. No argument has 
yet been framed in science or out of it that need cast 
any new doubt upon the existence of an Infinite Mind 
that is everywhere in power, and wisdom and love. 
That group, actors and lecturer, have surrendered too 



2l6 THE OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION. 

soon and too easily the " hallowed glory of a creed." 
Two years ago this actor had reached no such a depth 
of hostility to religion. His private talk in those sum- 
mer days was full of a belief in a God, and of hope of 
a second life more free from temptation and fuller of 
all that is nobler and better. He had a heart full of 
complaint against the church of his boyhood (the 
Roman) and against the Calvinistic creed, but he 
seemed to rest quite well in the thought that we were 
in the hands of a God, and that we were journeying 
toward a greater and a better land. It was not im- 
portant that a clergyman should be present at the 
funeral, but unless that actor's mind had emptied 
itself fully of recent thoughts there are hymns and 
chapters in religion which would have been full of 
adaptation to that sad hour of burial. 

Time remains for only one practical inference. 
Man, the wanderer, the one who thinks and loves 
and struggles, and, above all, the creature who fore- 
sees death and dies, has met with no new enemy of 
religious trust. What " soul of loveliness " the uni- 
verse ever had it possesses yet. Not a leaf of that 
rose has fallen. It always was a mysterious flower, 
with hidden roots and with colors and perfumes from 
unseen urns, but what it was in the years far gone it 
is in the years that are still unfolding. 



XV. 
MERIT. 



If God be for us. who can be against us ? — Rom. viii : 31. 
Their works do follow them. — Rev. xiv : 13. 

The world having come from God and God being 
the supreme wisdom and right the immense inference 
follows that the greatest success will always attend 
the greatest merit. A priori such a conclusion is true. 
Resting in such an undeniable tenet a great philan- 
thropist of our century not having many human allies to 
stand with him on the field of his moral battle said : "A 
man is in the majority when he has God on his side." 
He lived to see his trust confirmed by those awful bat- 
tle-fields in w T hich slavery fell never to rise and where 
the American name was washed white from its deep 
stain. Many heroes of the remote past cast them- 
selves upon the grand assumption that the right 
would prevail, and found in the intrinsic greatness of 
the thought a deep inspiration. A universe would 
soon fail if it were a general law that the demerit 
should avail more than merit, deformity more 

(217) 



2X8 MERIT, 



than beauty, hate more than love. The mind of man 
is wholly incapable of believing that the true and 
good shall be finally dethroned, and the false and the 
bad reign in their stead. Men leading false lives ex- 
pect in some future day to transfer their allegiance 
and be found at last under the flag of the right and 
the true. None expect a lasting success to come 
from any antagonism of God's law. It is impossible 
for the mind to think otherwise than that truth and 
right will prevail. 

The writer of the book of The Acts quotes these 
words from a saint : " If this work be of men it will 
come to naught, but if it be of God ye cannot over- 
throw it." Sophocles makes the drama of Antigone 
turn largely upon the idea that even the gods are 
held in their paths by the absolute right, and from the 
dark pages of that tragedy one may learn how deeply 
the mind was imbued in that age with the feeling that 
only right can be successful. The wife of Pontius 
Pilate warned her husband against injuring the inno- 
cent. Herod feared to behead that just man who had 
preached the right on the banks of the Jordan. Thus 
does history set before us a continuous scene of faith 
in the absolute right and of distrust in all the efforts 
of society or of the individual to escape the truth and 
justice. Most of the sublime pictures in human life 
are drawn from the times and places where the mind 



MERIT, 219 

has discovered the true and good and has toiled for it 
and waited for it through long years of intervening 
storm. Out of the intrinsic excellence of the right 
and the true and the good come the happiness of the 
artist, the dignity of the wise man and the repose of 
the Christian. We must conclude therefore that we 
are in a world where questions of success are all ques- 
tions of merit. Toward such a conclusion we are 
driven by that which ought to be and that which has 
been. 

What embarrasses the action of this principle is 
that the reward of merit may come very slowly while 
most men desire a near end, a goal at hand. Tell a 
young man that he will become a better lawyer or 
better physician or clergyman if he will prepare him- 
self the most perfectly for the coming pursuit, and he 
will not dare deny your premises, but he will gather 
up some individual reasons why he cannot follow the 
longer path, and will perhaps admit that he will ex- 
pect only a moderate amount of power or fitness. 
The larger proportion of the young and of those in 
mature life cannot trust much in the morrow and 
therefore they attempt to force out of one year the 
good which can only come from ten or twenty years. 
It is this forcing process which compels many to re- 
sort to artifice and all forms of pretense and base imi- 
tation, fraud being more instantaneous in result than 



220 MERIT. 

honest merit. To the injury which impatience and 
distrust of the future is bringing our world, conceit is 
making a large addition. Thousands confess that as 
a general rule real merit comes slowly but they feel 
that they are made personal exceptions by their pos- 
session of genius. Thus between the impatience of 
many and the natural-born greatness of many the 
long path to excellence is not much travel worn in 
these days. The grass is growing in the highway. 
Many of the marks of chariot wheels seen on that 
royal road were made centuries ago by beings who 
are dead. 

All this hasty preparation for a profession be it that 
of a preacher or lawyer or doctor or editor or actor or 
for any leading avocation is a struggle against God, 
just as truly as is a life of positive sin. Such con- 
duct has not the baseness of immorality and is not 
amenable to criminal law but it is none the less an in- 
surrection against the universe, and without having 
the turpitude of sin, suffers at last the penalty of a 
broken principle. The old catechism of the Presby- 
terians says " Sin is any want of conformity unto or 
actual transgression of the law of God," and if God 
passed a law that all human success must be based 
upon human merits, that all questions shall be those 
of real worth, then alas for the moral attitude of those 
who can show only the outward sign of a profession 



MERIT. 221 

or calling or art ! They are all transgressors and will 
come sooner or later upon some form of punishment 
— at least the punishment of failure. 

Man having inherited a seventy-year life, his suc- 
cess along any path involves the assumption of a 
morrow. Not being an ephemeral insect, he dares 
not live as such. He must live as a seventy-year 
tenant of a large estate, and since man lives as 
much for his family or children as for himself, his 
period of thrilling interest reaches beyond a whole 
century. Such is the arena for the acquisition and 
influence of merit, and it is in that long outreaching 
of time that real excellence wins its victories over 
that forlorn competitor found in pretense. 

The boundaries of life were marked out for special 
reasons — the work of man must have demanded such 
an expanse, and hence, when one attempts to leap 
into learning or art or fame or wisdom in a single 
year, he casts an insult at the slower process of 
nature. When the youth with his gifted mind can 
not assume the future and fall into the large plan of 
the Creator, he ruins his career in advance. The 
young must either assume a future or else ruin it. 
There are lawyers and preachers and writers now 
living who would gladly go back if possible, and lay 
with more patience all the foundations, mental and 
emotional, of their pursuits. They would have 



222 MERIT, 

lingered longer among languages and sciences and 
literatures and essayists and rhetoricians, could they 
have realized in advance that a half century was to 
come year by year after they had left the early 
school-house. Each new decade has revealed the 
bad judgment of that early impatience, and has 
brought the wish for permission, if possible, to try 
the race of life again. 

Woman joins in an insurrection against the universe 
when she acts as though her life were all involved in 
those few years covered by her personal beauty. Life 
coming from the Supreme Life contains no dead or 
deformed divisions or departments. The glory of 
God is all over it. Physical beauty is only one of the 
gifts of Heaven to the daughters of Earth. That form 
of worth may fade away into beauty of mind and 
heart, but it should be as dawn passes up into morn- 
ing, and not as evening passes down into night. Merit 
never deserts the soul. At all points of human life 
the individual is a blending of the human and the 
divine. Woman is fully authorized by Nature to 
make her fiftieth year as noble as her sixteenth, her 
learning, her conversation, her taste, her matchless 
purity, her infinite friendship which has not enough 
worlds to conquer being more than able to atone for 
the tints that may have faded from the cheek. When 
physical beauty is made the aim of being, life is lim- 



MERIT, 223 



ited to about twenty years. Thus are fifty years left 
without an adequate reason of being except that a 
part of the period was the approach to beauty, the 
other part a retreat full of much humiliation. The 
rose lives for its physical charm alone. Its beauty is 
the whole philosophy of its existence ; but the moment 
we estimate an intellectual and emotional being, then 
color and youth are only the incidents of a few years, 
and not the interpretation of a life. Merit stands 
ready to take possession of the whole three-score and 
ten years, and to make the last years more glorious 
than the first. God is with his children always. 

Even Shakespeare does injustice to mankind when 
he divides life into seven ages and uses up the last 
two in the formation of a kind of shivering ghost. 
The words 

" The sixth age shifts 
Into the lean and slipper' d pantaloons." 

and the succeeding lines are a kind of unintended in- 
sult to man and his Maker, for not one old person in a 
hundred passes away from life in such decrepitude. 
What ones of the world's great have thus staggered 
on and mumbled their way down to the tomb in your 
sight ? Did Washington and Jefferson and Madison 
and Webster and Clay and Jackson thus go down to 
their last sleep ? Pass rapidly over the mighty roll 



224 MERIT. 



of those who in the civilized nations have died since 
our country began, and you will find that not many 
of the grand multitude acted out the sixth and seventh 
scenes of Shakespeare, but rather sank suddenly down 
as heroes lie down to rest v v r hen a great victory has 
been won. Edmund Burke may stand as an average 
picture of an old age which comes after a life lived 
upon God's side. He moved England the more 
deeply the older he became. His mind seemed to 
acquire power as the gray hairs increased in number, 
and the heart grew yearly warmer toward friends and 
country. One of his greatest political productions 
was on its way to the printer when he fell in death — 
a colossus to the end. Thus Lord Brougham, thus 
Archbishop Tait went away, and thus the living great 
men, Gladstone and Victor Hugo and their class, are 
not playing the final parts assigned by the old 
dramatist, but they are moving along, giants to the 
last. 

Thus human life lies before us in its whole expanse 
an arena where the sons of God gathered their stores 
of merit. Childhood and youth and middle life and 
age are all one in the divine philosophy of man ; they 
all make one long harvest time when the arms may 
be full of rich sheaves. As a general rule for those 
whose three or four-score years are run it takes only 
three months to die. Angelo, when in his ninetieth 



MERIT. 225 



year, went onward with unabated mind and soul, 
throwing out his great thoughts in art and in poetry in 
a power of which his youth had not even the dream. 
His mind revealed only the sadness which comes from 
having discovered too late the inexpressible grandeur 
of the universe. In his last months he wept this son- 
net, full of regrets but full of power: 

" Borne to the utmost brink of life's dark sea 

Too late thy joys I understand, oh Earth ! 
How thou dost promise peace which cannot be 

And that repose which ever dies at birth ! 
The retrospect of life through many a day, 

Now to its close attained by Heaven's decree, 
Brings forth from memory in sad array 

Only old errors that still follow me." 

Thus ran this mind for nearly a hundred years and 
encountered nowhere a month or a day not marked 
with the strange divinity of soul. A single winter- 
time contained the period of failure, while it took 
ninety years to contain the days of triumph. 

It thus appears that our earth was projected as a 
place where the children of God were to gather up 
the virtues and powers and beauties of their Father. 
God is the Infinite Worth. He is Infinite Good, the 
Infinite True and the Infinite Beauty. 

All have said this, and deeply felt it. The ma- 
terial creation is only the unsealed alabaster-box 
15 



226 MERIT. 

whose perfume has rolled outward into space. Our 
world is therefore full of the outpoured spirit of the 
Almighty, and here the human race are permitted to 
wander to find what they can of the attributes of 
God. Man is out seeking merit, worth, worth of 
mind and heart, chiefly because his body shall return 
to dust; and while he is seeking this merit of any 
color or form, God is upon his side. In youth or 
in middle life or in old age, the pursuit and success 
are all one. Beauty will fade into some higher 
excellence, romance will be changed into wisdom 
and eloquence, the love of one enlarged into the love 
of all. 

No questions will ever surpass therefore the ques- 
tions of worth. All things false, all things which 
seem only, all things gotten together in haste, all 
shams fabricated by fraud and impatience are in the 
minority because God is not on their side. All who 
trust in these subterfuges will reach the most perfect 
disappointment. 

It was one of the many injurious blunders of the 
theologians that good works were to play no part in 
salvation. All was achieved by faith. In a world 
where lawyer and student and physician and orator 
and farmer and artist and statesman and poet and 
mechanic were to succeed by their special excellence, 
the doctrine that works were of no value in religion 
was a strange discord. 



MERIT. 227 

Merit was of infinite moment in all domains except 
that of morals. Here it was displaced by faith, and 
what that faith was no one exactly knew. Salvation 
by merit would have had two things in its favor : it 
would have harmonized with the world in which all 
merit wins, and it would have been by a method 
capable of being understood. Man may quarrel 
over the import of " faith," but all know an upright 
life when they see it, and have little doubt regarding 
its meaning and excellence. The office of Christ 
would have been enlarged rather than lessened, for to 
help the soul to find merit is better than to help it find 
salvation without such intrinsic worth. Christ's 
scheme was one for helping the heart find as much 
morality and piety as the world would help it find of 
pleasure or gain or ambition. To oppose the doc- 
trine of works was to oppose the whole genius of our 
world, and the church labored and groaned for cent- 
uries because it had not God on its side. 

So far as the church believed in works it miscon- 
strued them. It called fastings and abnegations and 
prayers by that name, and having lived in poverty 
and pain and seclusion, and having said a hundred 
prayers daily, the members summed these up as 
works, and often accumulated more than one soul 
would need. A surplus was often given kindly to 
some deficient soul. But when Christ or St. James 



228 MERIT, 



spoke of works they did not allude to the ceremonies 
of a formalist, the frequency of fastings and prayers, 
but to all that religious advance of the soul in piety 
and love which in study would make a scholar or in 
reflection a wise man or in traffic a merchant. The 
works of religion were an unfolding of the religious 
sentiment into action and character — a development 
of the divine quality of the heart — and therefore each 
half-starved monk or each gloomy, weeping Christian 
was an insurrection against the God and Savior 
whose service was dear but misunderstood. Should 
a group of earthly children attempt to worship their 
parents by a starvation and humiliation of self and a 
praise in hymn or prose of their parents, the father 
and mother thus exalted would beg their children to 
change their method and to honor their parents by a 
development of their youthful lives. Thus the Heav- 
enly Father asks for those human works which evoke 
and enlarge and establish the powers of the human 
souls. The education and liberty of the nineteenth 
century are better works than the hymns and prayers 
of the fifteenth. What heaven asks of earth is a per- 
petual accumulation of merit. 

Defective as modern civilization is, it contains this 
quality that it thinks more of enduring good than 
the past times, recent or remote. Government and 
religion especially are compelled to seek permanent 



MERIT, 229 

principles. The spread of education is the spread of 
reflection, and the essential worth is demanded of 
the government of an Ireland or the perdition of the 
Calvinist, and so far as an intrinsic merit is not found, 
the two schemes are condemned. Church and State 
must soon gravitate about a new center. As Eng- 
land studies absolute law of nature when she builds 
her railways and bridges and homes and temples, and 
has little of which to-morrow will be ashamed, so in 
administering government and in teaching religion 
all nations must hasten to that presence of God who 
is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

Perishable goods may trifle with forms and shapes. 
A lady's toilet may cast aside to-morrow the style 
that prevailed yesterday. Here caprice or fancy may 
rove quite free because the fabrics are soon to soil or 
perish, but when one works in marble or upon a can- 
vas, the permanent beauty is demanded, and lo ! we 
see the Corinthian capital or the statue of Apollo as 
beautiful at the end of twenty-five hundred years as 
at the beginning. Thus the mind of man not born to 
flourish a month only, but with great outreachings, 
must gather up from time to time only that excel- 
lence which no years can efface. The Corinthian 
capital of Greece is no more enduring than her Soc- 
rates, and the grace of Venus and Minerva in marble 
is no more eternal than the honor of Aristides and 



23O MERIT. 



the piety of Plato ; the arches of Roman architecture 
are no more lasting and graceful than are the verses 
of Virgil or the orations of Cicero. 

As education and reflection advance, it will become 
more and more difficult for anything to succeed but 
real merit. There are some departments of human 
life into which true worth is not rapidly coming, but 
in the intellectual and moral fields the demand will 
be alarming to many who had based their hopes upon 
external practice. A poor book, a poor doctor, a 
weak lawyer, a dull or vulgar editor cannot live as 
proudly as once they lived. The daily paper which 
shall bring to bear the most of enterprise and the most 
of literary talent and vivacity and the most of real 
manhood and honor will distance all competitors if 
ten or twenty years be assumed as the period for ex- 
periment. Sensationalism is for to-day, merit is for 
the long morrow. What Dr. Johnson said of a 
comedy written by a duke of Buckingham : " It hath 
not wit enough to keep it sweet," may furnish us with 
a parallel utterance over human life. " It must have 
merit enough in it to keep it sweet " — intrinsic worth 
being that richness or aroma that confers immortality. 
The spices of the East do not decay, they are pre- 
served by their own principle. 

Do we not therefore perceive in our earth a time 
and place where the beauty and goodness and great- 



MERIT. 231 



ness of God are attempting to cross over to man ? 
Not that man is to become as a god, but the universe 
is evidently the wish of the Creator rushing outward. 
It is the infinite spirit becoming visible and tangible 
and lovable. As the influence of the sun called light is 
said to be dark until it strikes an atmosphere and then 
suddenly it makes a flood of sunshine, so the Spirit 
of God invisible and unknowable strikes upon the ex- 
ternal and we have the universe — the music made by 
an unseen hand upon seen strings. Man is the being 
in which some of the attributes of the Supreme Soul 
are seeking a home. Humanity is a rolling stream 
which is gathering up into its ever swelling flood the 
glory of God and the glory of mankind. All merit 
will be saved and rewarded. A soul setting forth in 
its early years resolved to seek only absolute worth 
has hold of God's hand and nothing can be against it. 
Be the path amid darkness to-day it will emerge into 
light, the desert will become a garden, the wilderness 
shall blossom as the rose ; and since earth may not 
bring to pass all this promised triumph, this mortal 
full of imperishable worth can say on his death-bed 
with an ancient: "I am not going to die to-night, I 
am only going to be born/' 



XVI. 
THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 



Bussed be the Lord God of our fathers who hath put in the king's 
heart such a thing as this to beautify the house of the Lord which is 
in Jerusalem. — Ezra vii : 27. 

Of all sentiments, none is more universal than that 
of the beautiful. Some tribes can be found with no 
altars and no prayer and no hope of a second life, 
but no tribe can be found in which there is not a 
love of personal decoration. Wherever there has 
been a human mind, there has been this passion for 
ornament in more or less of power and judgment. 
Looking at all human history, the beautiful is a river 
that has followed the marching human race like the 
sweet, fresh water which followed that army that 
wandered in the desert under the banner of Moses. 
As man has filed along through Egypt or Greece or 
Palestine or Rome or Italy, the river of beauty has 
followed, or rather he has floated upon its deep and 
peaceful wave. The ruins of all the old States may 
be silent over the particular merits of those who built 
and occupied temple and palace and forum and villa, 

'232) 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 233 

but those ruins agree in assuring us that all those 
hearts harmonized in just such a taste as is now the 
foundation of art, and through art, of happiness. 

The thanks Ezra offered the Almighty that He 
had moved the spirit of Artaxerxes to beautify the 
temple are thanks which all the world offers when 
any grand decoration is added to the scenes where 
the people must pass life. It is said that seventy 
thousand workmen were busy over the second 
temple for about seven years, and in after generations 
so much more time was exhausted upon pillars and 
porches and gold and silver finishing that the Jews 
said to Christ: "Thirty and six years was this 
temple in building." Such an item from history is 
only a leaf from a forest ; for time and power would 
fail were any one to attempt naming the mighty and 
the minor decorations which man has left behind him 
in his long journey. Asia, that rich land that has 
swarmed with untold millions, joins Egypt and 
Greece and Rome and Italy and America in declar- 
ing that the sentiment of the beautiful is universal 
and powerful. It almost leads the heart to forgive 
the sins of the old states, the thought that they so 
loved to decorate their persons, their cities, their 
homes, their temples. The history of the human 
race, if widely written, would not be a record of only 
war or of quarrels in politics and religion, but it 



234 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

would be also a history of a sentiment — a strange 
sentiment, which in a child reaches after a rose, in 
manhood reaches after marble and purple and jewels 
and harp and song. This sentiment is not an inci- 
dental quality of man, but it is the great air around 
him or the solid land under foot. 

If you move away from city and town and home, 
and pass into the wild country, you have simply 
escaped from the decorations of man to fall into the 
richer enchantment of God ; for lo ! His fields are car- 
peted with grass, His green foliage blossoms, and not 
only reveals odors but sends forth a perfume; His 
dew-drops sparkle like diamonds ; His lily-stems are 
graceful ; His vines are festoons ; His trees make 
Gothic arches with their branches ; the winds make a 
music in this grove-temple, the birds are its choir. 
Thus from the fact of beauty there is no escape when 
the mind and heart are not broken by sin or calamity. 
Go where man may, and by day and by night he is 
in the immediate presence of the beautiful. 

Utility as exalted in our times has become a pas- 
sion of the hour, but that which is called utility is 
often only the lowest form of that kind of good. A 
high utility will include the beautiful ; for the beauti- 
ful is the useful. We shall not dare assume that these 
forms of thought and labor are one and the same, but 
we shall venture upon this, that beauty is one of the 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL, 235 

forms of utility, and shall dare offer as our theme that 
beauty is utility. 

Of such a proposition it should be proof enough 
not that God Himself ordered a great Nation to beau- 
tify a temple, for some might deny that such an order 
had ever issued from the skies, but proof enough that 
we pass life in a world all marked by decorations 
wrought by the Creator, and that we belong to a race 
which loves the ornaments of the world as much as it 
loves the world itself. We find in man a powerful 
appreciation of forms and odors and sounds and per- 
fumes, and we find a universe in which even the wing 
of the butterfly is painted, and where black clouds 
receive a rainbow, and where the birds are red or blue 
or spotted. God being thus fully committed to this 
sentiment of taste, we might well assume that all this 
scene of attractiveness has a moral end and is not a 
simple path of pleasure, but is a highway of greatness. 
Beyond doubt some of the states gave too much of 
their time and gold to that form of utility found in 
temples and statues and pictures, for the highest suc- 
cess will come from a symmetry of action and feeling, 
and that nation will be the grandest whose grasp shall 
include not only a good statue and a good poem and 
oration, but also a good wagon-road and a good 
reaping-machine. The periods of widest reach will 
be greatest just as those trees are strongest and most 



236 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

fruitful which have air and sun upon all sides of their 
branches. The fact that ornamentation injured of 
helped ruin Greece and the subsequent pupils — Flor- 
ence and Rome — resulted not from the bad influence 
of beauty, but from the absence of all else. Water is 
useful to sustain life ; but the world can not live on 
water only. It has a limited utility. So the moral 
law is useful ; but man can not exist upon only moral 
law. Man would die were he only a saint; he must 
enjoy also natural law, and be also a farmer or an 
artizan. Thus Greece and mediaeval Europe were in- 
jured by their pursuit of the beautiful because that 
pursuit was exclusive of all else. Out of those injured 
and ruined states beauty emerges not in the least 
marred in reputation, for it does not ask to be an 
Atlas and carry all the earth on its shoulders ; it asks 
to be one of the divine benefactors of society. It de- 
clines the office of a simple pleasure and asks to be 
I confessed a servant — a beautiful slave of the soul. 
Songs are as useful as plows ; poems are as full of 
utility as are railways and the telegraph ; architecture 
is as full of the valuable as is the carpenter- work, and 
the sewing machine is no more useful than is the bed 
of roses or violets. If you affirm that the carpenter 
can build a hut that will save life and that the bed of 
roses will not make a suit of clothes, then it may be 
affirmed that if man is to remain in a hut his life is 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 237 

not worth saving, and if he is never to appreciate 
roses he needs no clothes but a shroud. Thus the 
lower forms of utility need not toil much for man 
until the utility of taste has made or is to make him 
worthy of being an object of solicitude. The car- 
penter turns into an architect when the beautiful of 
God's world has made the mind outgrow its wigwam 
or cabin. Thus the conclusion comes back to us that 
beauty is utility; it is usefulness in full bloom. 

Defective as was classic and Florentine economy of 
life, injured as it was by an excessive use of only one 
branch of power, by that one hand it raised man out 
of a savage condition and helped make him ready for 
the wider civilization of Europe. All those crumbling 
columns and arches and all that statuary perfect still 
or marred by the ages, all those forms of grace which 
remain to tell us how the old nations bowed to a 
single sentiment — that of admiration, are remains 
not of old pleasures but of the great school-house 
where mind was awakened and cultured and strength- 
ened. A world once awakened to feel the beauty of 
an arch or a column or of an exquisite face is thus 
made ready to appreciate other forms of the attractive 
as they may appear, and can pass from a Venus or a 
Minerva to a spiritual Madonna or Beatrice quicker 
than it could pass to such a height from the low 
ground of barbarism. The figure of a Christ or of St. 



238 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

John was made more lovable to the human race by 
the figures which had come and gone before them in 
Greek art. Penelope and Zenobia and Cornelia pre- 
pared the human mind for Magdalen and the " Mother 
and Child," and for the ideal of woman in the nine- 
teenth century. All that study of eye and forehead 
and mouth which had engaged the artists for centuries 
along the Nile or around Athens or on the Tiber, all 
that carving of leaves of laurel or vine upon classic 
foreheads, all that working amid expression by Phid- 
ias and Parrhasius, was a fitting up of the studio for 
that day when art would be called upon to picture a 
divine face under a crown of thorns. 

There was an age once which reached and wrote 
down the conclusion that " knowledge is power/' and 
so knowledge is power; but it is rather such by its 
ability to cast the soul into a finer form of feeling 
toward society in its multiplicity of relations. But 
such learning as Calvin and his age possessed, such 
vast knowledge as John Milton and his equals 
enjoyed, was an inferior form of power compared 
with the deep feelings which can free slaves and 
establish public instruction and found nations upon 
principles of universal equality. Men of great stores 
of learning have often been men of great coldness or 
cruelty. From which facts the conclusion comes 
that although knowledge is power, it finds its om- 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 239 

nipotence only when it is joined to a divine tender- 
ness of heart. When the knowledge held by a 
Milton or a Scaliger combines with the sympathy of 
a John Bright or a Wilberforce, the highest power 
results. Calvin was incapable of feeling the equality 
and the rights of all humanity, because he was an 
intellect rather than a symmetrical soul ; but Stuart 
Mill, with a mass of learning greater than that of 
Calvin or Milton or either Scaliger, pitied the bond- 
age of woman or child, and was capable of sadness 
over a possible limit to the composition of music. 
As civilization advances, the character of the ideal 
man widens to admit a hemisphere of love, to make 
amends for the barbarism which struck from man all 
the elements of womanly nature ; and the character 
of woman widens to admit a hemisphere of intel- 
lectual power, to make amend once more for the van- 
dalism which had forbidden woman to wear any of 
the mental jewels of manhood. Thus compassion 
and learning combine in the ideal mortal. 

In making necessary adjustments and reforms in 
character the beautiful has performed and is perform- 
ing a measureless part. Nothing is more useful than 
the beautiful, not even the useful itself. A sensibil- 
ity once awakened is like a river once started from the 
melting mountain snows. It has received its gift of 
waters from the spring sun which has touched the 



240 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

Rocky Range or the Alps, and with pure clear treas- 
ures, better than the wine in a goblet of gold, it starts 
onward through the plains of populous life. The 
channel is dry and empty no more. New grasses 
and flowers on the bank salute their best friend. It is 
ready for many purposes. The miller asks it to turn 
his wheel ; the merchantman to float his ship ; the 
farmer, perhaps, to irrigate his field ; the flocks crowd 
down its banks at noon to slake their thirst, and the 
hidden veins in the soil and rocks transport this bless- 
ing afar to the roots of the elm and the oak. Not 
otherwise the sensibility of the mind once awakened 
by the ages of the beautiful ran on and was ready with 
one or another generation to realize the equality of 
man, or to sail in the ship of the missionary, or to 
gather all the children into the school-house, or to 
make laws to protect them from excessive toil. The 
river of sensibility ran for the local needs on its 
banks. 

At first sight the reformation in theology under Lu- 
ther, and in philosophy under Bacon seem the causes 
of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cent- 
uries. And powerful causes they were, and compared 
with them some may pity the centuries which poured 
all money and genius into the arts which around 
Angelo climbed up to a height which seemed bewil- 
dering and mad. But this very " beautiful " helped 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 24 I 

fit the three last centuries for their immense develop* 
ment of a colder utility. It was an awakening of 
man's soul — an inspiration of his heart, an inflaming 
of the ambition he would need along the new paths 
of Luther and Bacon. In an important sense the 
architecture of Europe, reaching from the Parthenon 
to St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the frescoed wall from 
Pompeii to the Sistine chapel, all the marbles, all the 
paintings, and all the poems between Homer and 
Shakespeare, were a preparation of the mind for that 
march it was to make in these last centuries of a pure 
utility. The mind could pass easily from the con- 
struction of St. Peter's to a bridge over the Menai 
chasm or the chasm at Niagara, and souls trained by 
Dante and Shakespeare could all the sooner grasp the 
idea of an engine or of a steamship, so nearly related 
are the domains of beauty and utility. The last three 
centuries descend, not only from Luther and Bacon, 
but also from Angelo and Dante and ail those who 
gathered up forms of song or music, for if Bacon 
marked out a new path of thought and labor the 
times before him garnered up the mental and spiritual 
power which was to sweep along the new pathway. 
When a voice from heaven commanded the king's 
heart to rebuild and beautify the temple, that voice 
was not whispering in behalf of only a pleasure, but 

it was laying the foundations of a culture which would 
16 



242 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

soon be called upon to behold the utility of the Ser- 
mon upon the Mount. 

The mind is at last a unit, and although its power 
may come from many sources, it is simply at last 
power, and hence the songs which children sing at 
school or at church, the flowers they may pluck on 
the way when May and June cast shadows of trees 
on the school-house roof, the poems they may com- 
mit to memory are woven into the subsequent force 
they may reveal in pulpit or in law or senate or in the 
common paths of life. As the vast sentiment of the 
beautiful came from the All-wise Creator, the pleas- 
ure it brings does not exhaust its import, but onward 
it flows, and helps keep up that grand usefulness 
which is remodelling the career of man. The flowers 
of the field are all wedded to mechanics and practical 
science, and the king's ornamental garden is fully 
related to the cornfield of his humblest subject, so 
that the mind trained in the one could go without 
violence to care for and enjoy the other. In the 
preparation of such practical and influential charac- 
ters as Webster and Gladstone and Mill and Bright 
and Castelar and Hugo, every scene in nature, the 
hills and valleys, the days of spring and summer, and 
all the fine arts enter early and abundantly, so that 
statesmanship itself is only an application of a mind 
whose power came not from politics only, but which 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 243 

simply spent itself in that vast field. Thus beauty is 
not a mere decoration of life, which like a lady's 
ribbons or feathers may be worn or omitted at pleas- 
ure, but it is an element always present in the com- 
position of mind. A soul with no sense of the beau- 
tiful could not be good or great in any field known 
to man. Beauty is a high form of usefulness. 

In that well known and remarkable village where 
labor and capital, engines and wheels and tools and 
furnaces and lumber and iron are made companions of 
beautiful homes and walks and parks and an attract- 
ive library and theatre and a sanctuary as beautiful 
as an Ezra could have wished for a Hebrew ceremony, 
the ornaments of home are as practical as is the 
engine which drives the machines. The yard in front 
of each home or the growth of grasses and flowers, is 
as full of value as is the water that runs in the house 
or the fire that burns in the kitchen. For civilization 
comes not by bread alone nor by bread and clothes 
and shelter, but by the uprising of many sentiments, 
and the true man or true woman is made at last like 
the temple of Artaxerxes and Ezra, by a wonderful 
mingling of rude timber and beaten gold, of hard rock 
and precious stones, of hidden iron and visible knops 
of flowers, of solid walls and delicate curtains of 
purple and crimson, of ordinary recesses and of spirit- 
ual holy places fitted for the breastplate of jewels and 
the presence of God. 



244 THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 

If in far-away half civilized times there came from 
Heaven a command to beautify the great temple of 
Jehovah, that voice is still sounding on the earth with 
a wider import than it carried when it was heard by 
the Persian king. For then man saw only the material 
sanctuary. Religion was external. It was located on 
a mountain, and was composed of altars and incense 
and robes and forms. The temple has diminished 
in these days in splendor, the seventy thousand 
workmen and the fifty millions of money are not ex- 
hausted upon any one pile of towering magnificence, 
but what marvels of splendor have departed from the 
external, material part of religion have sprung up in 
its thought and emotion, and our age has turned 
away from the candlesticks of solid gold and from the 
gemmed breastplate of the high priest to find the 
higher glory of doctrine and service. Year by year 
the horrible, the cruel, the bitterly unjust falls away 
from the nature of God and His Christ, and year by 
year there comes a new heaven and a new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. All admit now that 
the Father of the human race cannot be the author of 
a terrific and irrational system of doctrine. There 
must be a harmony between the character of God and 
the doctrines of His sanctuary. This fact our age is 
the first of all to perceive, and the zeal with which 
Hebrew and Persian toiled to rebuild the great fabric 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 245 

on Mount Moriah is now equalled by that modern 
zeal which rebuilds the teachings of the temple and 
beautifies the paths of salvation. For as barbarian 
and idolater assailed the beauty of Jerusalem, and 
plundered and burned and razed the house up whose 
marble step Solomon and his nation passed in such 
pride, and where the Queen of Sheba paused in such 
amazement, so in the middle and dark ages iron- 
handed men came with their curious and erring and 
pitiless philosophy to trample in the dust the simple 
flowers of faith and love and hope planted by the 
hand of Jesus Christ and abundantly watered by his 
tears. 

The moral beauty of modern religion is the best 
hope it possesses of utility. It must attract by its 
reasoning, for it can frame an argument which, com- 
pared with atheism, shall be full of eloquence ; it must 
attract by its good works, for the rumor of good 
works reaches even to heaven, " for their works do 
follow them." The beauty of the sanctuary must 
once more become its charm. No young heart ad- 
vancing into its career upon earth should be permitted 
to find in any other field of human thought or senti- 
ment more food for mind or soul, a beauty more real 
or unchanging, a pleasure more free from all alloy, an 
argument more reasonable or more kind, a group of 



246 



THE BEAUTIFUL IS THE USEFUL. 



fellow mortals more cultivated and less cold and vain 
and more sympathetic than he will find in the modern 
temple of worship. The beautiful is the useful, and 
in the finer, sweeter truth of to-day there is lying a 
mighty usefulness. 






XVII. 
A GREAT GOD. 



For the Lord is a great God. — Psalm xcv: 3. 

Wonderful as the unfolding of the natural world 
is the unfolding of the world spiritual. The natural 
world is the school-house in which we may, if we 
will, learn the higher truths of the moral universe. 
But as children often sit in the school-room all 
through their early years, unwilling to learn the 
lessons, longing for play or idleness, so we older 
ones pass our time in the great academy of nature, 
with our idle eyes wandering far away from the valu- 
able page. Let us try to-day to study one lesson, if 
for only an hour ; perhaps, as we all grow older, we 
may pass from page to page, and find all the book 
richer and more valuable the more we hang over its 
varied contents. 

The first idea in this morning's study is that as the 
floral world is developed out of itself, as the animal 
world is evolved from the less to the greater, so ideas 
grow, and from humility pass on to greatness, from 

(247) 



248 A GREAT GOD. 



cloud roll out into light. As the moon at night 
often remains partly concealed, and leaves the trav- 
eller or the poet or the lover uncertain as to where 
the loved satellite may be, but as presently the great 
silver ball moves out into the clear sky, so the ideas 
of man are only half visible at first, and pass out into 
the cloudless azure only after the eyes of earth have 
watched long and faithfully. There is a perfect har- 
mony between the world of plants and animals and 
the world of ideas. Once there was a wild dog 
moving stealthily through the old forests back of the 
Aryans and the Greeks. It was the color of the 
ground, that more powerful enemies could not see it 
readily, and that in its own ambush it might be 
invisible. It did not bark. It did not recognize in 
man its coming friend, nor did man six thousand 
years ago see in that creature of the forest the brute 
that was to come nearest of all the wordless animals 
to being a companion. Thousands of years have 
passed, and now a hundred or more species exist of 
this once wild beast of night and of prey. Once the 
plain wild rose bloomed in the woodland. But the 
toil and science and affection of man stood by this 
" sweet briar " for hundreds of years, and now all the 
civilized world is filled with roses of every size and 
every color and every perfume. Thus the material 
kingdom widens under the influence of intelligence 



A GREAT GOD. 



249 



and industry, passing from the small to the great as 
the spark of fire kindles into a conflagration. 

Just such is the growth of ideas. Man reaches a 
physical maturity at the age of thirty or forty, but 
there are ideas which will grow steadily for thousands 
of years without having reached any perfect stature 
and without having found a resting place. There 
are other notions that are born complete. When the 
first human intellect declared that tw r o and two are 
four, it exhausted the formula. The idea was finished. 
But when man for the first time pronounced the word 
"mother," or " liberty," or "friend," or "God," he 
began the construction of an object that should turn 
into a world, and from a world into a universe. The 
word " mother " did not mean much in the earliest 
tribes, for they would often put to death parents too 
old to work. In Abraham's day the word "sister" 
did not imply much beyond the meaning of woman 
or slave. And in Lot's day the home-names now so 
full of sacredness had little significance. Father and 
daughter were sounds that scarcely rose one shade 
above the terms male and female, and the word man 
differed little from the word brute. But along came 
the mighty stages of development pouring around 
these ideas the light of new thought and the warmth 
of new love. As the foliage of each summer and the 
riches of the elements fall upon the earth each year and 



250 A GREAT GOD. 



make its soil deeper and richer, so the successive gen- 
erations cast their thoughts and affections and actions 
down upon the world of ideas, and these ideas grow 
more and more luxuriant under this long lasting care. 
; Behold the Greeks adding to the import of the word 
"art!" Under their care how the word " beauty " 
expands ! And there Antigone came along, born out 
of poetry, and by her pure and infinite affection put 
to shame that estimate of sister seen in the history of 
Abraham and Lot. Look into the nineteenth century 
and mark how it has enlarged these terms. Ask 
Cowper the meaning of that word " mother " that runs 
along through so many languages. He gazes at the 
portrait and says with tears, 

" Oh, that those lips had language ! " 

The word " muth " comes down through thirty 
languages and through thirty centuries, but each age 
pours more of love and reflection into the beautiful 
urn. Our word " grace " once in Sanscrit represented 
the prancing horses that drew the chariot of the sun, 
but the deeper spirituality of subsequent eras has 
made the word mean the easy yielding friendship of 
a God. The sun's chariot passed away to make room 
for Christ. 

Among the ideas of earth that are most restless 
and most progressive and most infinite, let us confess 



A GREAT GOD. 25 I 



the idea of God. As the first geographers made our 
earth so contemptible that a man or a turtle was 
an adequate foundation for its mass, so the first theo- 
logians saw God only as a hero or a sleeping, dream- 
ing, Oriental king. Compared with the nations 
around, the God of the Hebrews marked a wonderful 
progress, and looking into the darkness around him, 
David truly sang his song " For our Lord is a great 
God," but even his picture was far below the reality, 
and the world hastened to move on. Christianity 
came and gave the idea of the Heavenly Father a new 
and wonderful impulse. The actions once attributed 
to Deity were repudiated by Christ, and out of that 
New Testament era there came a new Creator, a new 
Father. An idea marched rapidly forward. 

You perceive now, my friends, the method of my 
argument, and it need not be pursued further. It is 
time to apply it to the religious faith and practice of 
our day. The lesson that comes to us from the ar- 
gument is simply this : We must take the words of 
the past, " Our Lord is a great God," and empty into 
them the light and sentiment of the present or else 
there will be no psalm for our hearts. One thing 
that chills modern worship may be found in the at- 
tempt of modern hearts to worship the God pictured 
in the far-off yesterday. If you would love your 
child you will not dare ask old India to define the word 



252 A GREAT GOD. 



child for you. If you are to fight for liberty you will 
not dare ask an old Persian king to define the polit- 
ical idea in your behalf. No heroism, no sacrifice ; 
will spring' up in your bosom out of his thought. 
But if your own day tells you that liberty implies the 
freedom of all, even women, and implies the freedom 
of the mind from ignorance and of the soul from de- 
grading vice, then you can go to the battlefield with 
divine calmness and power. It can not be otherwise 
in the act of worship. It will be perfectly vain for 
you to attempt laying flowers of affection upon the 
altar of the Hebrew God or Calvin's God or the 
papal God. 

One of the first preludes of worship must be the 
gloria, " Our God is a great God," for unless the soul 
feels that it is approaching a being of infinite beauty, 
a being without spot, the worship will all turn into 
mockery, notwithstanding the upturned face and 
bended knee. As a fact, no age will ever be able to 
find an exact image of the Creator. But the world 
is cumulative, and will, as a general rule, give in its 
later estimate more truth in religion than it found in 
all former meditations. Hence, you who feel ever 
the impulse of worship, the sweetness of it, the 
solemnity of it in the spirit, must be careful to kneel 
at the altar of a great God, that you may yourself be 
transfigured on the holy mount. It often comes to 



A GREAT GOD. 253 



pass that the best worship comes into the soul when 
it is out under the heavens at night or in the forests 
in summer, because there the infinity of the sky, that 
host of stars whose light has come to us only by 
falling a million years, or the sweet solitude of the 
forest where every leaf seems written upon by the 
finger of the Omnipresent One, fills the human spirit 
with such a consciousness of a great God that the 
worshiper bursts forth in tears. Coleridge, in the 
valley of Chamouni, betrays the secret of all deep 
worship : 

11 Awake, 
Voice of sweet song ! Awake, my heart, awake ! 
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn, 
Thou first and chief sole sovereign of the vale, 
Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night 
And visited all night by troops of stars," 

Thus that immense phenomenon of nature became 
a voice eloquent ; proclaiming the greatness of that 
Being before whom the human soul is wont to kneel. 
Whatever thus exalts the Creator exalts him not 
only as a power, but as a love, and hence in the sub- 
limity of that mountain there came not to the relig- 
ious mind only the feeling of nearness to one who 
made the world, but in the magnificent light and in 
the whispering of the pines there came full persuasion 
of Heaven's tenderness toward man. We cannot love 



254 A GREAT GOD, 



a contemptible human being. All the beloved ones 
of history stand forth in some alluring atmosphere of 
genius or truth or beauty, and without much admix- 
ture of meanness or sin. Never can we carry our 
worship to a defective God. He must rise up before 
us in such a holy and alluring form that the heart 
will ask all the world to join it in its anthem. Ac- 
tions, ideas, persons, creeds that once were the sym- 
bols of religion, and marred the divine idea by the 
blighting power of association, must be carefully re- 
moved from the temple that the worshiper may bow 
before something that he may deeply love. 

Men come to the minister of religion and ask him 
how he explains this and that dark page of history, 
this or that dogma. Oftentimes the best reply would 
be, " Turn aside from all that record and go ask this 
age, these scenes, the wants of to-day, the longings of 
your soul to give you back the lost or injured God." 
Much that is called theology is only the place where 
men have trampled down the ground in their own 
mad conflicts. In India devout heathen move in pro- 
cession through the streets saying "ram," "ram," 
and the spectators bow because those who thus run 
are priests of religion ; but the infinite God is not 
there. Those fakirs that cut their bodies with knives 
are all theologians. Thus the religious history of the 
world marks not the place where God has been, but 



A GREAT GOD. 255 



only the places where human hope and human mad- 
ness, human darkness and light, met and struggled 
and bled. When the poor heretic was burned at 
Geneva, when the covenanter girl was tied to a stake 
where the tide would slowly rise over her, when the 
witches w r ere burned, when infants were damned,— 
God was not present; religion was not there. Those 
places were spots where contending men met, just as 
old Carthage and old Alexandria, were places where 
opposing vandals came together, and where between 
sword and spear warm life became death and brilliant 
cities a desolation. When looking back you behold 
these harrowing scenes reaching along over the cent- 
uries, remember God w 7 as not there. For our God 
is a great God. The sufferings of the martyr, the 
tears of the exile, the children lost because unbap- 
tized, the men condemned from all eternity, the auto- 
dafes of earth, are not ideas to which ever God drew 
near ; but rather paths where the feet of man tram- 
pled when he was just emerging from the night of 
perfect barbarism, when women loved the amphi- 
theatre of death, and when heroes drank from the 
skull of an enemy. Before the modern soul can be- 
come a true worshiper it is often necessary to ap- 
proach God, not upon the side of old history, but 
upon the side of new nature. Give us Jesus Christ 
and the great spectacle of the universe, that Being 



256 A GREAT GOD. 



and these heavens, and we can find a God, to worship 
whom will ever be a joy. The moral splendor of 
Christ and the parallel infiniteness of creation give 
the mind a Deity so great that all the universe be- 
comes his temple, and all winds and thunders and 
bird songs combine in a hymn of adoration. 

Religion has been wrought out in its details from 
two different points of observation. A strange geog- 
rapher, from some star, landing upon earth in the 
northern regions, would go back saying he had found 
a world of ice ; landing at the equator, he would de- 
clare he had found a planet covered with flowers. 
Thus religion has been described from two stand- 
points, but chiefly from the stand-point of man. The 
survey of it from the modern idea of God has yet 
scarcely been made. The world's heart has not toiled 
under the sublime watchword of the psalm, " Our 
Lord is a great God," and from that lofty statement 
made up all the essential parts of its worship; but 
rather the human family has said, " Man is a great 
man," and has drawn its creeds and ceremonies out of 
the human bosom. When you perceive candles 
burning by the altar and a pageant of bowing priests, 
whose robes are bespangled with gold, you may chant 
the words, "Great is man," but you must reserve for 
some other hour the higher chant, " Our God is a 
great God." You must keep back these higher 



A GREAT GOD. 257 



words until either the vastness of the universe, or the 
great wave of human life, or the awful mystery of 
death, has led you away from the wax tapers, and 
brought you into the presence of the Infinite. The 
great sanctuaries of man, from the mighty St. Peter's 
of Rome to the great abbey of Westminster, were for 
hundreds of years places where the little children of 
religion played their sacred games around the altar of 
a God for whom they had no measurement. Could 
the real Deity have come down from the invisible 
home and poured himself into those vain hearts, all 
the toys and ceremonies of the hour would have been 
overwhelmed by the glory of the Heavenly Father. 
When John Rogers or Servetus was suffering in the 
flames could the great God of Heaven have revealed 
Himself, could that wretched throng around the kin- 
dling fire have had their souls enlarged until the true 
idea of God could have found entrance, that company 
would have plucked the victim from the stake and 
have begged to be forgiven for an error so weak and 
for a crime so cruel. They would have wept for days 
over such an injustice to a brother, and for engaging 
in such a satire upon the Almighty. 

Much of the indefiniteness of the Bible comes 
from the fact that God cares nothing for the minutiae 
of human worship. There is nothing definite in the 

Bible except the picture of Christ leading man to 
17 



258 A GREAT GOD. 



virtue, because the greatness of God forbids that he 
should care for aught beside. To suppose the Cre- 
ator of the universe to have a choice between immer- 
sion and sprinkling, to suppose the Almighty to be 
partial to a posture in prayer, to suppose him to have 
a choice between a government of bishops and a 
government by all the clergy, to inquire whether the 
Infinite One loves better the robes of the priest or 
the plain dress of the citizen — this is to degrade the 
name of God and to drag worship down to the level 
of a court etiquette. The Bible is the most indefinite 
of books in the delineation of forms, and the most 
definite of all books in pointing out the reward and 
punishment of virtue and vice. Its baptism is 
obscure ; its righteousness is most evident. Only a 
most precise and trifling argument can find Presbyte- 
rianism or the Episcopacy in the Bible, but a broad, 
visible, noble argument points out the Savior of man- 
kind. It is only a microscopic analysis that can find 
in that book the world's " Confessions of Faith," but 
the human soul can not read a page in the book 
without hearing a whole sky-full of angels saying : 
" Blessed are the pure in heart." The manner of 
baptism, the time, the manner of the Trinity, the 
last analysis of Christ, the presbyter or the bishop, 
all these, and a thousand more ideas lie in the Bible 
in utter neglect, because the God whom we worship 



A. GREAT GOD. 259 



has no preference here. He cares not what man finds 
in the holy writings if only he finds virtue. We should 
all as soon ask of God whether we should plant 
our flower-bed with pinks or with violets as to inquire 
of him whether our baptism must be in much water or 
by a few drops. Taking your stand close by the great- 
ness of God, not only does the smallness of much of 
man's creed appear in a strong light, but also much 
of its falseness falls with a thrilling pain upon the 
heart. Who is this God that any age or any individ- 
ual should ever have debated the destiny of a dying 
infant ? What is there in the Infinite One, what is 
there in that Being whose throne is in the centre of 
the universe, in that Being whose sunlight is only a 
feeble emblem of His love, that should make the 
mother hasten to have her dying child baptized lest 
it might fall from her bosom into a world of tor- 
ments ? What has God done that His name should 
suffer such long and painful degradation ? God has 
done nothing to merit such a creed. But religion has 
been wrought out, not from the being of God, but 
from the being of man. Man has come to us in all 
ages, and offered us a Deity fashioned after the near- 
est king or despot, and millions of children, old and 
young, have gone to bed whispering their pray- 
ers to a Deity not so kind or sweet or just as the 
mother who has just bidden them "good night!" 



260 A GREAT GOD. 



In those days it used to be a dreadful fear that per- 
haps we might that night go from the kingdom of 
our mother to the kingdom of God. Our mother 
was always more beautiful than God ! 

It is now complained by public men, men full of 
fear for our country overrun by all forms of vice, that 
religion is doing little to purify the atmosphere that 
hangs like a cloud of doom over our nation. How 
far the church at large merits such words of half sor- 
row and half reproach, no one can tell, but we feel 
fully ready to say that the more the altars of human 
worship draw their light and inspiration from the 
character of God alone, and linger less around the 
ideas that come only from man, the more rapid will 
be the ascent of the nation toward a higher life. Many 
an altar now exists to which the worshipers repair, 
not that they may find holiness, but may keep alive 
some ideas held by their fathers. A large part of 
church life is only a rivalry about systems instead of 
an humble worship of God. Oh, had we all the wings 
of piety that would carry us, and the breadth of mind 
for such a flight, and should we fly to the throne, and 
instead of deducing religion up from man bring it 
down from the realm of light, we should return to 
earth with a piety that would dispel the fears of the 
statesmen, and make radiant the future of the great 
nation and the poor mortal heart. How can an altar 



A GREAT GOD. 26 1 



reform earth when it is itself a part of earth ? How 
can it lift us to God when its god is already upon the 
ground and is himself partly clay? Altars enough there 
are along the paths. And when the patriot counts 
them he may well wonder that good citizens do not 
come marching forth in holy multitudes out of such 
a cloud of incense. But it is not numbers of altars that 
most save men. All depends upon the idea to which 
the holy stones are heaped up. It will be ages upon 
ages before an altar to Presbyterianism or Methodism 
or to Romanism or to Independency or to Eloquence 
or to Genius will bless the world like an altar to the 
Living God. The running to and fro of men full of 
anxiety lest their church may not be visible enough, 
the acrimonious warfare of sects over their childish 
properties, will never enter the world's great life and 
form a part of its goodness and piety. In presence 
of such a church our nation can march right along to 
destruction, just as Rome sunk in vice while the 
temples were full and a thousand priests were inton- 
ing psalms at the altar. The altar was inscribed to 
man, not to God. The sanctuary of the Great God 
with Christ as the High Priest, is the only one from 
which the present century can come forth with a soul 
whiter than it carried into it. Our age must part 
company with the baleful associations of the old 
theology. A theology that unconsciously degraded 



262 A GREAT GOD. 



the God it loved ; it must define religion to be, not a 
belief, but a piety ; it must look up to God and from 
the Father, Son, and Spirit draw down a religion 
with the greatness of God written all over it. It 
must hear that voice that created all things by the 
word of its power repeating the deep laws of His 
temple — a righteousness that loves the true and good ; 
a faith that guides ; a penitence that washes white ; a 
love that embraces the world ; a hope that adds eter- 
nity to time, paradise to earth, and a Christ the leader 
and inspiration in the midst of these doctrines, and 
then upborne by ideas so vast and so true the age 
may soon cease to weep that its temples do not 
bring it a higher civilization. We dare not make 
God a party to our petty warfare of creeds. We dare 
not employ him in our inquisitions or in our debates 
over transubstantiation or legitimacy. He must be 
seen only as a Great God sitting upon the throne of 
justice, so lofty, so infinite, that a soul passing into 
his temple will feel that nothing but a pure heart can 
fit it for so sublime a worship. 



XVIII. 
THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 



Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. — Matt. 

Our earth has been governed in turns by military 
chieftains, by hereditary rulers, by patriarchs and by 
majorities, but it has not yet passed into the hands of 
the meek. And yet there must be a great truth 
lurking in this one of the beatitudes, because Christ 
spoke no empty words. The words of Jesus have all 
through our era been an inexhaustible mine of wealth, 
and there is no probability that this brief benediction 
is any exception to the rule or standard of excellence. 
To catch the probable import of such a teaching we 
must remember that Christ was not only practical, 
fitting himself to the immediate wants of His times, 
but He was also an idealist and opitimist of the highest 
order, and spoke for the far-off centuries and epochs 
His goal was the perfection of God, as is seen in the 
words : " Be ye also perfect even as your Father in 
Heaven is perfect." Far more than the old artists who 
produced their masterpieces as though for the delight 

(263) 



264 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

of remote nations, Christ spoke for the future of the 
world, however long it might continue. Remember- 
ing this fact we can imagine that there may yet be 
before mankind an expanse of time in which the 
meek can pass into power. They may be a kind of 
spiritual century plant — very slow to bloom. 

The word translated by our English term "meek" 
demands a moment's attention. Our word is not an 
exact equivalent of the one in the Greek manuscripts, 
for in our day the term " meek " rather involves the 
idea of patience when imposed upon — a willingness 
to bear burdens even when placed unjustly upon the 
shoulders. In the Greek tongue the term implied a 
peaceful and gentlemanly bearing, a tendency to avoid 
violence and to seek the good and the peace of all 
the community. The term was used to express 
something of that refinement represented by our 
word culture. In the Bible and classic period there 
were many blustering generals and demagogues, 
many violent and cruel officers making the most pos- 
sible show of authority, and compared with such, a 
Christ and a Paul and a St. John stood forth in an 
amazing outline of gentleness. In such a contrast 
the meaning of our term appears, and by such an in- 
terpretation the final triumph of the meek is made 
more probable. For this benediction and prophecy 
fall upon simply the cultivated minds of the human 



THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 265 

race— those developed upon the moral and intellect- 
ual sides. Into the hands of these will pass at last 
the many principalities and powers of our globe. 
The kingdoms of mere force, or of royal blood, or 
of money, will fade away in the splendor of the new 
kingdom of the mind. The earth, through and by 
means of many vicissitudes, is advancing toward a 
government swayed by a mental aristocracy. 

The word aristocracy originated in the desire of 
the Greeks and other races to escape absolute despot- 
ism. It embodied in a degree the very thought seen 
in the benediction, " Blessed are the meek," for the 
Greek term aristokratia betrayed a weariness of one- 
man power and a longing for a power that should be 
vested in the best citizens. " Let our laws and orders 
and decrees be issued, not by one man often ambi- 
tious and cruel and senseless, but by all the best 
men." This was the original import of the political 
term aristocracy. Not often, however, does a noble 
idea, issuing from some idealist, retain or ever reach 
its import out in the actual field of service. The 
term Christian is worn by many a criminal, and by 
none who are perfectly like him from whom the epi- 
thet came ; and liberty is said to have had great 
crimes committed in its name. Into an imperfect 
world moved that noble principle, of being governed 
by the best ; but the best soon came to imply those 



266 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY, 

who had heaped up money, or had long held office, 
or whose parents had been in power, and along came 
the political contradictions called tc aristocracy of 
blood," or u aristocracy of land," or " aristocracy of 
office " — verbal and political blunders as great as 
theologians would make should they speak of 
" landed Christians," or " Christians by blood," or 
" millionaire Christians." The vital element in a 
Christian is a likeness to Jesus, and a vital element in 
an aristocrat is that he be one of the best men. Our 
text is a blessing let fall upon that grand future when 
the best persons will take possession of the earth. It 
is a looking forward toward a period when the despot 
and the military hero and the blooded prince will be 
displaced by the cultivated mind and the moral heart. 
Living eighteen hundred years after Christ uttered 
this prophecy, we should see some signs of its fulfill- 
ment. 

Our own land ought to show some buds of this 
promised blossoming, for into this continent have 
migrated nearly all the best ideas which the world 
has elaborated since the death of Christ. Ideas 
seem to be endowed with the attributes of persons 
and to become travellers as in search of a new world. 
Could the eye see spiritual things it would have had 
the pleasure, all through the last hundreds of years, 
of seeing social and political truths embarking from 



TilE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 267 

the shores of Europe to become voluntary exiles in 
the Western continent. Here the wide expanse of 
unoccupied land, here the soil, here the climate, here 
the absence of old fixed institutions, here a thousand 
possibilities invited the young truths of the old 
lands, and for this continent these ardent young ideas 
set sail. As the wild birds perceive the approach of 
winter, mark it in the falling leaf and in the wind of 
autumn, and at last direct a long flight southward 
where they will find beautiful forest and green field, 
so the social truths of mankind take wing and seek 
a world where the fields are fresh and sweet for their 
varied action. Many of these migrating ideas have 
alighted in the hills and plains of America. Here, 
therefore, can be seen most plainly the progress of 
the idea that the cultivated shall inherit the earth. 
Here is not to be seen the actual rule of reason and 
virtue, but here are to be found hints that our world 
is moving toward such a destiny. Let us make a 
hasty survey of the principal social facts that have 
been created since the days of the Nazarene. 

The military rulers are fading away. You need 
not be reminded that human, political and religious 
history is written in blood. The "meek" have been 
under the wheels of the war-chariot. All the long 
way between Caesar and Napoleon the eye of the trav- 
eller looks upon old battlefields. Between the field 



268 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

where the great Caesar met the Germans and the field 
called Waterloo there were not many indications that 
the wise and kind and good would ever inherit the 
earth. The benediction of Jesus could not be heard 
above the great tumult. An English poet expresses 
well in verse this sad delay; making Napoleon the 
figure in the scene : 

" On eyes and lips 
Burnt the red hues of Love's eclipse; 
Beneath his strong triumphal tread 
All days the human wine-press bled; 
And in the silence of the nights 
Pale prophets stood upon the heights, 
And, gazing through the blood-red gloom 
Far eastward to the dead Christ's tomb, 
Wailed to the winds. Yet Christ still slept, 
And o'er his white tomb slowly crept 
The fiery shadow of a sword." 

This picture, none too vivid as to the nineteen centu- 
ries, seems to fade somewhat in the second Napoleon, 
as though at Sedan the reign of pure military power 
had reached its terminus. The surrender of a military 
chieftain and a hundred thousand soldiers threw 
almost the grandest of the nations back upon indus- 
try and reason and peace, upon personal rights and 
equality; and thus added the republic of France to that 
of America. Two such examples as France and the 
United States are enough to disturb the equilibrium 



THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 269 

of the world, and make the shadow of the sword grow 
faint upon " the white tomb." Under the lead of such 
men as Castelar, Spain is drawing a little nearer to a 
kingdom of thought, and under the guidance of dis- 
tinguished scholars and essayists and philanthropists 
England has moved far away from the despotism of 
her own history. All who will make a survey of the 
centres of power will confess that mental force is su- 
perseding the logic of bayonet and gun. 

But is there rising up on the ruins of this old 
military aristocracy an aristocracy of wealth? Must 
we change the beatitude and say : " Blessed are 
the rich, for they shall inherit the world?" Must 
the meek, flying from the sword of the warrior, fall 
into the hands of the rich? Even if so, this would 
be a pleasant change. The aristocrats of money are 
far better governors than those of w r ar. Men of 
wealth develop a country, but the pursuit of war is a 
perpetual destruction. Money, even when held by 
the few, is wont to ally itself to art and education and 
religion, and to all forms of internal improvements. 
Intelligent capitalists must develop the country which 
contains and supplies their substance. The money 
lords of Ireland are not intelligent, for they have for 
generations so crushed the tenantry that only one or 
two per cent, of profit is realized from estates which 
might have been made to yield four per cent, to the 



270 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

owner and two to the tenant. A landed aristocracy 
is a bad thing, but especially so when it is an igno- 
rant landed aristocracy ; men skilled in the chase or 
in the details of the race course, but not in the laws 
of labor and wealth and increase. The enterprise 
near our city called "Pullman" is an instance of an 
intelligent aristocracy — a money power which helps 
itself by helping the laborer. The rule of an intelli- 
gent monied class might thus be a great advance over 
the governments by blood and by sword which have 
filled so many pages in the records of earth ; for it 
must be remembered that the great light which is 
falling upon this age is falling upon the millionaires 
as well as upon the middle and poorer classes; and 
never again will capital deal with labor as it dealt 
with labor in France and Ireland a hundred years 
ago, or in Georgia and Mississippi when our nation 
was lingering in the darkness of the past. Should a 
monied empire come to America, it will not come as 
a Shylock, but as an incarnate selfishness, seeking the 
supreme good of self by a tolerable welfare of all. 
It will permit you and me to flourish a little that it 
may have a greater income of gold. The Irish land- 
lords and the old slave-owners expected riches to 
come from broken hearts. The monied aristocrats 
of to-morrow, if they should appear, will take good 
care of all birds that lay golden eggs. 



THE COMIXG ARISTOCRACY. 2/1 

Having conceded this much to the supposed king- 
dom of money, should it come, let us proceed to 
state that this kingdom, like that of royal blood and 
that of the sword, is fading away. The reign of the 
educated and moral, as foreseen by Christ, is coming 
more rapidly than the sway of riches. In the new 
evolution of government, the man who has many 
millions can have his vote cancelled by a country 
school-teacher, who may be toiling for fifty dollars a 
month. And when we remember how few are the 
very rich compared with the millions who read and 
think, but who are in only a moderate financial con- 
dition, we do not see any great obstacle in the way 
of the kingdom of the mind. Xo good for the indi- 
vidual or for the State advances by a flowery path. 
As spring always comes by sudden onsets and 
retreats, making the human soul exult and sink by 
turns, and in this latitude consumes sixty days in its 
struggle with the north wind, so the progress of a 
mild and sweet philosophy makes many an alarming 
halt in a struggle with old and new enemies. Blind 
is the eye and dull the soul which can not see in our 
land an amazing phenomenon — that of the intellectual 
and moral inheriting a continent. Without a standing 
army, without a navy, without valuable forts, here 
are fifty millions of people living under the throne of 
reason alone. Much folly is mingled with this intel- 



272 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

ligence, as there is no gold that has not its alloy, but 
if there is folly within, it is not the wretched folly of 
royal blood, not the ruinous folly of the sword, but 
the blunders of men living in a world greater than 
their grasp or than their virtues. Our land seems to 
be an effort of the school-house to supersede the 
cannon and the crown and the musical ring of gold ; 
and to that degree appears to be some outline of the 
dominion foreseen by the One who said : " Blessed 
are the meek." 

That humanity is nearing a reign of thought and 
virtue rather than of folly and vice, may be inferred 
from the new position accorded to woman. Woman 
was perhaps first degraded in the primitive times, 
when power was all a physical force. As a physical 
machine, she always has ranked below man ; and it 
may be that barbarism, vain of physical powers, made 
a hero out of man and a slave out of woman. Be 
this as it may, once out of her high birthright it was 
impossible to find a way of return. In India and in 
pagan lands, she has lost all memory and dream of 
inherent equality, and as did the slaves of our former 
South, indorses her own sorrows. The recent and 
rapid return of woman to her lost empire of equality 
shows that the general kingdom of mind is setting 
in, and that the reasons for the subjection of woman 
have disappeared. In the old world of battles and 



THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 273 

wrestling and boxing, woman became a pigmy, but 
in a world of mind and morals she escapes all charge 
of inferiority, and in rising heralds a new era. 

The triumphant passage of the " anti-polygamy" 
bill is the utterance of an age in favor of the equality 
of man and woman. It is monstrous that the conti- 
nent tolerated so long the idea that woman was only 
a twentieth or fiftieth part of a man's value in mind, 
morals, or money. The isolation and remoteness of 
Utah made the nation overlook, for many years, the 
deep insult to woman involved in that Mormon settle- 
ment. The whole utterance of that colony was, from 
the outset, a satire on religion and a defiance of 
nature itself, for nature has for thousands of years 
declared that each woman is as valuable as each man. 
That some Mormon females should favor their degra- 
dation is natural, for conditions the most monstrous 
become at last accepted, and are made even matters of 
delight — many an Indian squaw feeling honored by 
her bondage, and many a slave woman being gratified 
at the prices brought by herself and children in the 
public market. 

We thus behold polygamy and slavery and mon- 
archy and military powers falling before those forms 
of power which Christ ascribed to the meek. The 
human scene to-day is that of vast millions trying to 

marshal themselves under the lead of thought and 
18 



274 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

taste. The millions have tried everything except 
reason and culture. They have experimented with 
all forms of abstract philosophy, and have dressed in 
rags and eaten plain food with the hope that a theory 
could bring blessedness ; the millions have fled to the 
wilderness, to caves and all solitudes under the im- 
pression that the best way to use the world was to fly 
from it ; again have the millions been slaves to royal 
blood, and have fallen down on the face and placed 
the mouth in the dust while the gilded chariot of a 
king was passing; again have the common people 
sounded the depths of ignorance to learn whether 
there is most bliss where there is most ignorance ; nor 
in their long and dreadful inquiry have the number- 
less throngs forgotten to fasten their bodies to the 
wheels of war to find the rewards of arrow and spear 
and bayonet; and now at last humanity is coming in 
weary from this mad chase, and is slowly but surely 
taking refuge under the words : " Blessed are the 
meek for they shall inherit the earth," The scene is 
that of a lost world coming home. 

Strange result if the human race shall quietly steal 
away from despots, monarchs, generals, from landed 
lords, and from royalty to be governed by universal 
thought and sentiment. Are the Caesars and Napo- 
leons and Bismarcks and the King Williams and the 
czars to abdicate in favor of the aggregate wisdom 



THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 2?$ 

and tenderness of mankind ? Beyond doubt they 
are thus at last to resign, for their thrones have floated 
along until they have reached a strange land. The 
people are a strange people. No ancient monarch 
ever looked out upon such subjects. They all have 
books in their hands. Those who once were slaves 
are now reading ; and souls once willing to be offered 
up to king or soldier now glow with a sense of per- 
sonal manhood or womanhood. On old Egyptian 
tablets there are rude pictures of one man leading 
many men by strings or wires put through their 
tongues ; the Roman slave did not dare speak to his 
master, there were middle men to repeat the slave's 
words and to receive the answer, but in the tablets of 
the present the common man has a book in his hand. 
Not a transient picture this, but one painted by the hu- 
man race for immortality. We know it from these two 
reflections — the one that Christ uttered no words which 
have not given full sign of coming true. All His re- 
maining generalizations have fitted themselves to so- 
ciety and have become more applicable as civilization 
has advanced. We must suppose the words about the 
" meek " to be robed in stainless truth and to be par- 
takers of a divine destiny ; the other reflection that 
Christ and God are supreme ideals of mind and sen- 
timent. Those names stand for soul. The king 
throws down his sceptre and the conqueror his sword 



2^6 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY. 

when they go away to their God. Christ and God, 
therefore, emblazon the thought that " There is noth- 
ing great on earth except man, and there is nothing 
great in man but his soul. ,, The fading shadow of 
the sword, and the decline of force, and the gradual 
uprising of the public thought and love are only the 
efforts of God's children to find their way to their 
Father's presence— efforts of mind to enter upon its 
dominion over all the forms of brute force. God is 
called love, and Christ is called a lamb, and the uni- 
versal Spirit a dove, thus showing us in a threefold 
emblem that the sword and spear shall rest, royalty 
will perish, wicked ambition fail, but the gentle em- 
pire of reason and affection will blend with the image 
of God and be the final country of mankind. 



XIX. 
SPIRITUALITY. 



To be spiritually minded is life. — Rom. viii : 6. 

This is one of those expressions which come to us 
from the Platonic atmosphere. The spirit was a cer- 
tain divine spark in man. With it the Almighty 
communed. In it lay divine qualities and the 
germ of immortality. Opposed to this and in the 
same individual was a coarser, ruder nature, fond 
of food and drink and riches, and all temporary 
and animal pleasures. In the flesh this lower nature 
dwelt; and hence it was called the carnal or flesh- 
nature. These two warred incessantly. They were 
like the summer and winter of nature. Winter slays 
the flowers which the summer takes so much delight 
in producing. After all the long husbandry of spring 
and summer-time comes 

<< * * * the frost from the clear cold heaven as falls the plague on 

men. 
And the brightness of their smile is gone from upland glade and 

glen." 

(277) 



278 SPIRITUALITY. 

Thus all through the moral world, around Paul and 
John and their Greek companions, moved these two 
seasons, the spiritual and the carnal, the summer and 
winter of man, the carnal always anxious to lay 
waste the garden in which the spiritual nature had 
been toiling with love and industry. Hence Paul de- 
clares that to be carnally minded is death, but to be 
spiritually minded is life. These once significant 
words the old theologians and literalists have tossed 
about and repeated until their original significance is 
forgotten, and they come to us children only like 
dead flowers placed in a damp old book by people of 
good intentions in the last generation. And yet 
through this text : " To be carnally minded is death, 
but to be spiritually minded is life," there once flowed a 
clear, deep stream of thought between fresh and green 
banks. But this was when Paul and Plato were see- 
ing a new world through eyes which had just re- 
ceived light. Since then the stream they saw has 
run dry. Instead of the landscape they beheld, we 
are sometimes pointed to little standing, stagnant 
rills, called total depravity or orthodoxy, as being the 
streams which Paul saw under the name of flesh and 
spirit, long ago. 

One half of Paul's sentence will furnish theme 
enough for the hour. " To be spiritually minded is 
life" are words which offer as a theme Spirituality. 



SPIRITUALITY. 279 



The truth is best seen by contrast ; hence the 
former half of Paul's sentence casts light upon the 
latter, for in the death which carnality brings, one 
may perceive more clearly the life which comes by 
the path of the spirit. All the years and generations 
around Paul had borne witness that to follow the 
flesh was to make life hasten toward the end, and to 
an end inglorious. The glutton and drunkard and 
libertine, the man of violence, the man of wicked 
ambition, the brutalized criminal, all these had 
marched along then even more strikingly than they 
file along in our age, and had made him realize that 
the passions of the flesh lead to death. In his time 
many a Herod was dying before his day; many an 
Antony and Cleopatra were hurrying through their 
careers ; many a prodigal was spending his substance 
in riotous living; many thousands of young men 
were dying violent deaths ; and viewing this spec- 
tacle, the philosophy of the hour came back with 
force to Paul's bosom that the passions of the flesh 
lead to death, the passions of the spirit lead toward 
life. In the opening chapter of this letter to the 
Romans, there is a picture of Roman morals, and in 
that condition of society you will find the cause of 
that great generalization that the flesh brings ruin, 
the spirit brings triumph. What were the battles of 
Alexander and of the Csesars but a fleshly vanity, 



28o SPIRITUALITY. 

gratifying itself in the tumult and blood of carnage, 
and in the applause which rewarded the conqueror? 

But as opposed to this picture, around Paul lived 
and died in peace and dignity not a few righteous, 
not a few literary and thinking and even devoutly 
pious men and women, their years running far along 
toward a beautiful close, and this, too, must have 
confirmed his theory that to be spiritually minded is 
life. All else is death. The drunkard and glutton 
and libertine not only die early, but their grave seems 
an absolute annihilation or a hell, but the death of 
the spiritual seems only a sleep. They depart to be 
with Christ, which seems far better. Thus, by means 
of the contrast in the text, the light falls more clearly 
upon that spirituality which is our subject for the 
day. 

Let us seek an approximative meaning of spirit- 
uality. Approximative, because few are the words 
in morals which will admit of an exact definition. 
We may and must use words all through life of 
which we can not give exactly the meaning. Words 
are not things, but only pictures of things. And 
as there can be no perfect picture of anything, so there 
can be no perfect embodiment of truth in the material 
of letters. If there has never been a perfect portrait 
painted of king or subject or child, if colors are so 
powerless in the hand of even genius, why should the 



SPIRITUALITY. 2 8 1 

sound of letters be so adequate and tell perfectly 
what the soul thinks ? The infirmity which attends 
painting or sculpture attends language too, and the 
end of all art being expression, language comes in at 
nightfall along with painter and sculptor, sad that it 
has so imperfectly done its task. And this also is 
true, that the more insignificant a thing, the more truly 
can art express it. The painter can depict a log or a 
box, or a stone, but when he would hand down to 
posterity a Christ or a Madonna the imperfection of 
the art becomes manifest. So in language, we catch 
the meaning of " and " and " of," or " add " and " sub- 
tract," but the moment the ideas threaten to rise in 
value and to assume such outlines as " love," c< God," 
"goodness," "soul," "spirituality," the sounds of 
vowels and consonants, like the colors of the artist, 
refuse to do full duty. There are men who will tell 
you that they know the perfect significance of every 
word in the domain of salvation. They know what 
salvation means, what Heaven means, and know 
all about the import of faith and reprobation; but 
just so there are painters who will set up before 
you a great canvas and tell you that that picture is the 
ocean or an autumnal woods, and so there are mu- 
sicians who will play away at a " Sonata Patheiique" 
and sigh at last as though that were the whole idea, 
but all these, theologian and painter and musician 



282 SPIRITUALITY. 



are like children who throw a stone out on the sea 
or lake and imagine it went almost across. 

It may be the glory and beauty of such words as 
" spirituality/' that its final meaning baffles pursuit, 
for it leaves a charm for to-morrow, something still 
to be sought and won. It stands like the future, al- 
ways open to receive new hopes and plans, and to 
offer to the soul new mystery and charm. But vague 
as is this term, it has, as ages have passed by, given 
out a few qualities of itself; it has exhaled some fra- 
grance upon the air around its growing and blooming 
form. 

Spirituality is a culture of the highest. As the 
spirit stands for that part of man which resembles his 
Maker, as it is not the God in man which loves food 
and drink and riches and war and office, as these 
wants spring from the body, but as the divine part in 
man is that which loves truth and honor and benev- 
olence and all eternal beauty, hence spirituality is a 
culture of all that is highest, a gathering up of things 
most divine. It is the mind's escape from the tem- 
poral and petty, and its voyage into the open sea of 
great truth and emotion. Men by common consent 
call the body the casket, the soul the gem. Hence 
two sets of ideas spring up to meet this two fold man, 
this casket and this gem. Much of the language and 
struggle of the street and shop and farm is regarding 



SPIRITUALITY. 2 8 1 



the casket, its house, its table, its raiment, its furni- 
ture, its carriage, its servants ; but passing away from 
these walks of life, and coming to the rooms of the 
poet or philosopher, or into the chapel or solitude of 
the worshiper, or passing into the galleries of high- 
est art, you have come into the language, not about 
the casket, but about the gem. Hence an approxi- 
mative definition of the term might be that spirit- 
uality is a living amid the highest. By no means does 
the word belong to religion alone. It follows man 
along all his paths, and if anywhere he rises above the 
appetites of the flesh and deals in the pure and abso- 
lutely beautiful, it calls him by its own lofty name. 
When Whittier writes his " Snow Bound," he is as 
spiritual as a Cowper or a Heber, for all through the 
poem run the lofty ideas of home and friendship and 
love and God and immortality, not dragged in, as into 
the cold creed of a theologian, but stepping in of 
their own sweet free-will, as song-birds betake them- 
selves to tree or hedge. What can be more spiritual 
than the lines in the memory of the dead sister : 

" I cannot feel that thou art far 
Since near at need the angels are, 
And when the sunset gates unbar 

Shall I not see thee waiting stand, 
And, white against the evening star, 
The welcome of thy beckoning hand ?" 



284 SPIRITUALITY. 

It may, indeed, be that spirituality is always an 
inseparable part of religion, but if so, religion must be 
widened out until it will embrace the soul in all its 
best hours of pure joy and deep thought and deep 
sadness. And doubtless the definition should be ex- 
panded until within its wide domain there should be 
room for all those who have seized upon all the high- 
est things of which their poor hearts knew — a Plato 
studying eternal beauty, a Confucius reaching up 
for the highest, a Joseph of Arimathea coming to a 
holy tomb with the spices and oils which might em- 
balm forever such a divine Lord. Indefinite though 
the bounds of religion are, and indefinite though the 
word of our theme may be, yet, no doubt, could all 
hearts of the past be weighed and measured, there 
would be found in the bosom of many a heathen a 
spirituality nobler, richer, more pleasing to God, than 
the so-called religion which many a self-deceived 
mortal has proclaimed along the streets of Christian 
lands. In the power to look up with love and de- 
light toward the Infinite Spirit many an Antonine 
has surpassed many a Louis XIV or Henry VIII. 
Judged by the presence of spirituality, religion in its 
true sense is as old and as broad as the historic race 
of man. To be spiritually minded must have been 
life in the days of Abraham and Job. 

Let us seek for further information about this grace 



SPIRITUALITY. 285 



by recalling the names of those confessed to possess 
the virtue. Beloved names are they all ; for, as 
spirituality deals only in the highest and broadest, 
ideas, it does not intrude upon mankind narrow defi- 
nitions which please a sect and offend a world. It is 
everybody's friend. A Calvin comes along with his 
strong and analytical mind and offends a half of the 
world by his sharp affirmations and denials. So 
comes Luther. So come Edwards and Wesley. 
These are all great and useful* men indeed, but their 
value is in the field of temporary battle rather than 
in the field of perpetual peace. Calvin was made 
great, like Orange or Wellington, by battling against 
the foes of the human race. But the battle once 
over, Calvin and Luther did not remain the types of 
the ideal, everlasting Christianity. They were sent 
to manage a war, and not to mold the peace. The 
makers of creeds some part of the world always 
hates. He who builds up a philosophy offends the 
holders of all other systems. But when spirituality 
comes along, all love it because it moves along above 
their local questions, as the sun pours out his light 
on the evil and the good. Antonine, the Pious, all 
moral minds love regardless of denominations. Jew, 
Mohammedan, Christian, Catholic, Protestant, all 
quote from the great Roman Emperor's " Medita- 
tions/' because in them the soul pours along not as 



286 SPIRITUALITY. 

a cold discrimination, but as a love of God and man. 
The " Meditation " moves along above the halls of 
debate as broad as the soliloquy of Hamlet or Gray's 
elegy. All hearts find their delight as they find it 
in nature or in friendship. Antonine breaks away 
from the body and pours out all his thoughts in the 
name of the soul. 

But more deeply spiritual is Thomas a'Kempis. 
The Roman had only an imperfect conception of God, 
and the future he faced with resignation rather than 
belief. The spirituality of Antonine was thus divest- 
ed of joy and was clouded day and night; but the 
a'Kempis stood in an unclouded world and saw 
clearly God and immortality. In his great book there 
is little trace of distinctive Roman Catholic ideas. 
Pope and bishop and saints, and all the questions 
that vex the church, and which make the food of am- 
bition and strife, were far down in the noisy vale be- 
neath the dreamer's feet. His book, like his cell in 
the monastery, is a solitude across whose page no be- 
ing but God can pass and repass. As for seventy years 
the gates of the convent shut out the world, so that 
a'Kempis knew not and cared not what king or pope 
was buried or crowned, so the same seclusion shut 
out local and temporary dogmas and disputations, 
and left the book open only for the footstep of God 
and the soul. Many false notions accompanied this 



SPIRITUALITY. 287 



old saint when he was born into the world and they 
followed him till he passed out, but notwithstand- 
ing these inherited errors, Thomas a'Kempis adorns 
greatly the roll of spiritual names. 

Of this school was Bunyan. He was full of special 
doctrine indeed, but his doctrines are only the most 
general doctrines of Jesus Christ, and these are so 
covered up in metaphor that they offend no one of 
whatever sect. The bundle of sin on the Pilgrim's 
back does not seem to be the depravity announced by 
the theologians. It is a bundle which all will confess 
themselves to be carrying. The entire creed of all 
the churches might lie in that Pilgrim's Progress with- 
out awakening any protest, for the doctrines are so 
softened by imagery, by allegory and impersonation, 
that they are not any longer the dogmas of schools 
but pictures in the gallery of life. In John Bunyan's 
hand religion becomes exalted, resolved into its high- 
est elements. It passes from the dry catechism out 
into the world of beauty or feeling. The Wicket- 
Gate, the Delectable Mountains, the House Beautiful, 
the Valley of Humiliation, all these great visions take 
Christianity away from quarrelsome intellects, and 
place it out among the entities of man, along with 
ocean, hill, forest and river. Men who deny a per- 
sonal devil are perfectly willing to see an Apollyon 
striding across the human path ; men who deny a hell 



288 SPIRITUALITY. 

are firm believers in the dens of the giants which Bun- 
yan describes. Thus, in a mind so spiritual, all the 
world looks and sees the truth it needs and loves. 
The human heart says : u You may say what you 
wish about orthodoxy or heterodoxy, or this or that 
creed, this in the Tilgrim's Progress is religion. " 

To these add Fenelon and Madam Guyon and 
George Fox and the poet Cowper, and you have 
other members of the large and powerful spiritual 
school. With them Christianity was transfigured in 
its shining garments. Thither must we look if we 
would see the inner quality of such a holy faith. 
These names only awaken memory of a large multi- 
tude who have known that spiritual mindedness 
which is life. The great names we have pronounced 
are only leaders whose voice and example a large 
army follows. There are men in all denominations 
and times, who, caring little for the formulated 
words of the church, are finding, in its highest signif- 
icance, a religion the highest, a salvation from sin the 
surest. 

Having asked some great names of history to help 
us find the meaning of spirituality, let us assume 
that w r e have found some part of that infinite import, 
and let us then attempt some estimate of its worth. 

Spirituality must be the chief quality in Christian- 
ity, because that which deals with the highest is al- 



SPIRITUALITY, 289 

ways the best. The book or the painting which 
places before us the highest thoughts demands our 
chiefest reverence and study. The man who mixes 
the paints in a back room or who tunes a musical in- 
strument, can never merit from society the praise or 
love flung to the one who paints the picture or sweeps 
over the harp strings. So in religion, the dealers in 
creeds and forms, valuable though such persons may 
be, can never equal in goodness or divineness those 
who paint for mankind the religion of the soul. The 
literalists and sectarians may be only mixers of paints 
which they cannot use, custodians of ideas, as a slave 
may be the custodian of a vault full of gold and 
jewels. The world has need of these, and faithfully 
do they stand guard, ready to growl at all passers by. 
But the men of spirituality have owned the treasures 
of the vault and have often lavished the gold upon 
the human race, and worn the jewels of religion in 
its sight. In our age, many a leader in church mat- 
ters breaks down in public affairs and reveals an utter 
want of common integrity. What Christianity these 
hold is only a consent to some logical system, such a 
consent as one gives to free trade or a tariff. Left 
with these minds, the name of Christian would soon 
lose all its significance. For its lasting hold upon 
society, Christianity must look to those who are 

colored in their souls by the spirit of that Prince of 
19 



29O SPIRITUALITY. 



spirituality — Jesus Christ. As when a war is over 
the general goes into retirement and leaves a happy 
populace to restore industry, to build and decorate 
homes and temples and streets, and bring back the 
arts, so the theologians, having fought the battle of 
thought, pass into rest and leave the minds full of 
spirituality to carry the ark of the Lord onward in 
power and beauty. These come with song and prayer 
and sweet meditation, and transport the ark across a 
wilderness wide, and, but for them, desolate. 

Most righteous of all forms of religion is this inner 
piety. In its loftiness of spirit this little world be- 
comes well under foot. Its temptations to dishonor 
lose their power. Antonine, though an emperor, lived 
in plainness and humility; Bunyan was happy in his 
jail ; Fenelon was joyful in exile ; Madam Guyon gave 
away her fortune to the poor — all this because in this 
spiritual atmosphere earth became small in its riches 
and honors and gratifications, and great only as the 
home of the soul. In the lives of these lofty ones 
you will find the purest form of integrity. A religion 
which permits food and drink and riches to be large 
elements in life, enlarges all the temptations to dis- 
honesty; but the spirituality which depresses these 
things silences their loud and fatal eloquence. Should 
an age come when religion shall be not a creed, but 
a high life, a life full of prayer and meditation and 



SPIRITUALITY. 



29I 



song, then, in such an age, to be honest, to be pure in 
heart will be easy, for the lofty spirit of the church 
shall lift all its children above the street. All dis- 
honor comes from the vanity of the body. Make the 
soul only great, and gold and office and appetite will 
clamor no more. 

Truly, as Paul says, "To be spiritually minded is 
life," It is life honorable, for it lifts the feet out of the 
mire of unrighteousness, and places them upon a 
mountain full of God and the angels. All these 
spiritual mortals, from Paul to Guyon and Cowper, 
have not found it difficult to obey the words of the 
Master — " Blessed are the pure in heart." They are 
seen high up in a mountain air, where the path, wind- 
ing around, takes them daily farther from earth and 
nearer heaven. 

To be spiritually minded is life broad and generous, 
for it is an escape from the little and a taking refuge 
in a practice the purest, in a creed the most universal 
and hence permanent, in a love the most comprehen- 
sive. The slave of a creed will always be narrow, the 
w r orshiper of God, in the full sense of that term will 
be charitable and generous, for the mantle of the 
Father seems to fall on the child. Hence John, the 
most spiritual of the New Testament group, said to all 
the world, " Love ye one another." So vague is spir- 
ituality that into its courts a conflict over words can 
not come. 



292 SPIRITUALITY. 

To be spiritually minded is life beautiful, for spirit- 
uality is not the frame-work of religion, but the fin- 
ished temple, with every minaret and ornament fin- 
ished and with organ tones within ; not a naked tree 
in wintry blast, but the tree in summer's rich verdure. 

To be spiritually minded is life indeed, life immor- 
tal, for it is the soul getting away from its dust. It is 
man ascending the mountain on whose summit is God. 
To be carnally minded is death, a constant descent 
into more darkness and blight; but to be spiritually 
minded is to be moving up toward the serene sky, 
where the sunlight is sweet and no storms come. 

O Paradise ! O Paradise ! 

Who doth not crave thy rest ? 
Who would not seek the happy land 

Where they that love are blest; 
Where loyal hearts and true 

Stand ever in the light, 
All rapture through and through 

In God's most holy sight? 



XX. 
THE HIGHER LIFE. 



He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest. — 
Luke i : 32. 

In this incidental sentence from the life of Jesus, 
God wears an almost lost title, that of " The Highest." 
It has pleased best the modern heart to call the Deity 
by the name of Almighty or Allwise or Omnipresent 
One, or Creator, or Father, and to let fall into disuse 
the old name of Most High. Perhaps the common 
mind has been most amazed by the power or wisdom 
or omnipresence of God, and has been less moved by 
that figure of speech which places the Creator upon a 
sublime height. Be the facts what they may, in this 
expression just quoted, this peculiar phase of divinity 
comes up before us, and we rejoice over the words, 
" Son of the Highest." They recall a certain quality 
of our world, and bring to remembrance many events 
and utterances that belong to the history of man. 
We remember now that certain noble philanthropists 
spoke and lived in the name of the higher law, that 
certain Christians have dreamed of a higher life, that 

(293) 



294 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

some great lawyer told his young brethren at the bar 
that there was room above for more members of that 
profession, that at the old feasts it was customary to 
invite some humble one to come up higher, that 
Christ was transfigured on a mountain, that Moses 
met God up in a mountain, and at last was buried in 
the eternal heights. We now remember, too, that 
some of the famous ones of earth have been called 
" lofty minds," and others have been called " eagles 
of eloquence," or of learning, because they so soared 
above the common multitude. From all which med- 
itations and remembrances may come a lesson about 
The Higher Life. 

Let us leave wholly to a certain class of Christians 
the idea that man can easily reach a moral perfection, 
and having come to that condition must wait for the 
visible appearing of the Savior, must despise daily 
duty and pleasure, and wait for a visible kingdom of 
Christ. We think of the phrase " higher life " only 
as illustrated in all those great names which are 
carved in history as it unrolls from the most remote 
antiquity to times the most recent. What a roll of 
greatness should we have were there tables of marble 
or brass or gold in which were engraved the names 
of those who in all times and places have attempted to 
attain mental and spiritual excellence. It is a sad 
thought that what is called history is only a page 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 29 5 

from a vast and grand, but lost, volume. Violence 
and reckless ambition impressed into service all the 
chroniclers of the past, and that kind of greatness we 
see in Christ was not often asked to sit for its picture. 
It was too high for the surrounding kings and their 
hosts of sycophants. It would require a whole Lon 
don of Westminster Abbeys to hold the urns of the 
noble ones whose very names are forgotten. The 
loss is great to the present, for many minds see a 
preponderance of evil in our age, and are not sure 
that our world was planned by benevolence, to which 
desponding minds an adequate conception of the con- 
tinuous glory of man would be a welcome inspira- 
tion. The doctrine of the " Apostolic succession,'* 
that always the literal hands of a dying bishop rested 
upon the literal head of a successor, may be a relig- 
ious fable, but it is no fable that there has been a 
succession of minds on the heights, and these have 
signaled to each other in all the years of man upon 
our globe. What ones are visible, are only a few 
wanderers from the mighty herd. Solon and Moses 
studied at the Egyptian Heliopolis indeed, but of the 
many thousands of men always studying there, it 
can not be possible that the honors were all borne 
away by a Hebrew and a Greek. At that educational 
centre, thousands and tens of thousands came and 
tarried and went while centuries passed along. It 



296 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

must be that the few names that have come to us are 
only types of a great army which was scattered over 
the prolific East. Aspasia was not the only intellect- 
ual, powerful woman of the age of Pericles. She 
was the one brought into the foreground by her alli- 
ance with a powerful king ; others having her educa- 
tion and her beauty and power lived and died in a 
fame that could not cross the gulf of many centuries. 
Nor was Cleopatra the only Greco- Egyptian woman 
who could speak and write in all the tongues of the 
Mediterranean coast, but she was one made historic 
by the accidents of crowns and vices, leaving us to 
assume that there were other women, many who 
equaled her in learning, and passed far above her 
in all higher worth. Thus history is only a page out 
of a lost volume. As those who dig in the sands of 
the Swiss lakes, or in the deserted cave-homes of 
man and beast, or who explore the ruins of Mycenae, 
toss out a few implements or a few carved bones or a 
few jewels worn once by beauty, so history casts up 
out of the vast sepulchre where the ages sleep traces 
only of an absent world. Each noble name spoken 
in our day stands for ten thousand of men and 
women — names which no lips will ever pronounce 
again. As Victor Hugo says : " Their tombs are 
gone. The rain has washed them down, and the 
grass has concealed them." But your imagination 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 



297 



need not be fettered by the unjust records of scribes. 
It can easily look back and see a long line of 
kings and queens of thought and taste and kindness 
and morals and piety, many of whom should, if all 
were known, be full of earthly fame. The stars that 
are brightest in our midnight sky are not therefore 
the largest and grandest. They are simply the near- 
est to our little ball ; and so in history, some men 
and women are made great by being near us in 
language or style or ancestry or sympathy. In real- 
ity there are many souls as great in the outer depths 
of time, but their orbits were in other domains of the 
great blue. 

From the seen and the unseen group of illustrious 
mortals of yesterday, we perceive that there is a lofty 
table-land of mind and sentiment and morals, which 
offers man a happiness far beyond that which he finds 
in the vale. In one of his essays upon the phenomena 
of nature, Bacon tells of a mountain so high that no 
storm ever disturbs its air. Its climate knows little 
vicissitude. The clouds can not float so high. The 
sunshine is constant by day, and the night comes 
late and the morning comes soon. So peaceful is 
that summit that a traveller having written some 
words in the white ashes of his camp fire, found the 
words still there after a score of years had passed. 
What an Elysian field is that ! far above tornado and 



298 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

lightning shafts, and the miasma of the marsh and the 
battlefields of men. A fable in part, but an emblem 
of those heights where dwell those mortals who have 
reached the widest and deepest education and affec- 
tion and the purest ethics. 

As in classifying physical beauty we feel constrained 
to make distinctions between a violet and an oak, or 
between a cascade with its murmur and mist, and a 
cathedral with its spire and arches, and between a 
trailing vine and a range of mountains, and must 
change our words with the change of feeling in the 
soul, and to the rose say " beautiful," to the oak 
"grand," " pretty" to the violet, and " sublime" to 
the mountain, so we must divide into many parts the 
attractiveness of humanity, and must confess some to 
be witty, some pretty, some beautiful, some learned, 
and then when already the heart is full of admiration 
it perceives one more class rising above all other 
grades of mortality— those morally and mentally 
great. Here the scene is not beautiful, but sublime. 
In this grouping all ages may meet. Wealth becomes 
a mere accident, whose presence or absence counts 
nothing ; for Zeno was poor, Marcus Aurelius rich ; 
personal appearance goes for naught, for Socrates and 
St. Paul were without charm of face or form ; ances- 
try is omitted in this estimate of values, for Gustavus, 
" The Lion of the North," was born a monarch, 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 299 

Epictetus a slave; differences of creed are excluded, 
for Grotius was a Protestant, Massillon a Romanist, 
Cousin an Eclectic. 

The infinite love of the Creator is in nothing more 
manifested than in this, that he has made this moral 
height accessible to all. Not all can be rich, not all 
can be beautiful, not all can be witty, not all can be 
young, but all can climb upward to the higher life. 
It is not the mere privilege of all, but the pressing 
duty of all. The heights are large and voices full of 
mercy and of alarm are bidding those in the valley to 
" Go up higher." God is represented as being in the 
holy mountains, and thither He expects his children 
to come. The heights are everywhere. They are 
seen in each profession and pursuit. There are mer- 
chants who grovel in the mire and whose gains stand 
for fraud, and there are merchants whose wealth tells 
of the industry and growth and welfare of the people. 
There are lawyers low and high — lawyers who are 
always upon the side of criminals and concerning 
whose health and presence criminals are said to make 
inquiry before they plan a new crime ; other lawyers, 
to whom men repair for help when they feel that their 
cause is just, and the points of law and equity must 
be placed clearly before jury or bench. There are 
writers low and writers who are lofty. The former 
are witty and verbose in the defamation of character, 



300 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

and in detailing the sins of society — these are the re- 
mains of human coarseness that are being slowly but 
steadily eliminated from all written thought, and 
therefore in greater multitude appear the writers of 
the pure school whose editorials or essays or books 
or poems come into all homes as welcome as the 
beams of the morning sun. 

It is one of the humiliating things of the modern 
stage that it will compel a high-minded actor or 
actress to recite some of the low ideas of even Shake- 
speare, and compel an audience to sit and wait for 
the outgrown and outlived vulgarism to pass by. All 
of you who have attended what is called " High drama" 
have blushed because some noble person on the 
boards has had to wade through a stream of mud to 
reach the beautiful and good beyond. The world 
has not yet fully learned that the low in Shakespeare 
is no more pardonable than the low in the Five Points 
of New York, or in the " Fish Market." Appearing 
anywhere it is the relic of barbarism, and has no claim 
whatever upon the time and taste of a sweeter age. 
Shakespeare has so much richness and purity, that to 
fling aside all his coarseness would be only to lop a 
few dead limbs from a blossoming orchard. The low 
style in a new drama has no defense whatever, and it 
should be eliminated from all literature, ancient or 
modern, sacred or profane, because the fame of a 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 30 1 

writer is not half so precious to mankind as the fame 
of that which is highest. The coarse words of the 
past must be deposed, dethroned by that kingly suc- 
cessor called Purity now coming into the world. This 
coming purity is not, one may be sorry to confess, the 
result of religious progress, but rather of an advance 
of refinement, of a gradual triumph of mind over 
animal qualities. But coming by way of either piety 
or enlightenment it is a welcome visitor and should 
be asked to stay. 

The arts are affected by the higher life of the age 
and are struggling up toward subjects which awaken 
the nobler order of emotion. But here the future 
may well be a little doubted, for France so leads in 
the painter's art, at least, that we may well fear that 
she will continue to soil her canvas with the general 
landscape of sin. France is still the victim of passion 
and emotion in art, and feels that the heights are 
noble but too quiet, divine but cold. Perhaps the 
other nations can rise in their own might and escape 
the snares of the enchantress. The struggle has been 
long, and victory is yet in a balance. But should 
England and America go on purifying all other forms 
of thought and emotion, painting will be compelled 
to appeal to the growing sense of the pure and the 
eternal. 

This " Higher Life " is visible in the theology of our 



302 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

period. Some of the oldest of you can remember 
when the many denominations were as quarrelsome 
as they were numerous, as fond of abusing their 
neighbors as they were of singing about heaven. 
Piety and ill-will seemed in constant alliance, offensive 
and defensive. The terms of reproach and abuse 
were as numerous and familiar as the terms of theol- 
ogy. Sermons were charged with warning against all 
the creeds except the one of the pulpit that uttered the 
warning. The war of the parishes was incessant; not 
bloody indeed, but full of the words that kill the buds 
or fruits of friendship, and that set neighbor against 
neighbor in a war of words. Thus was Christianity 
down in the valley of strife. It was indeed a Church 
militant, but unfortunately it warred upon itself. It 
devoured its own children. 

The uprising of an external world to be conquered, 
to be educated and civilized and christianized, has 
drawn the Church away from itself, away from its dis 
tinctions and definitions, and thus away from the ill- 
feelings that such words engender. The individual 
heart always climbs a height when it ceases to think 
only of self and embarks upon some other sea. Hence 
the German maxim, " Look not inward but outward, 
not backward but forward, not downward but up." 
It is the soul that looks always upon its own thoughts 
and feelings that finds the most unhappiness in the 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 303 

world and that narrows the stream of life into a rill 
rather than widens it into a sea. The old inquiry 
was : What do I believe ? What do you believe ? 
The new question is : What can I do ? What can you 
do for mankind ? Small inquiries as to the number 
of words, but so vast in meaning that the Church has 
been transformed and redeemed by them. The ab- 
struse in theology has been displaced by the welfare 
of man. Questions of education, questions of suffrage, 
questions of benevolence, of ragged schools, of liberty, 
of labor and of home life have risen and consigned to 
obscurity the useless themes of our fathers. The 
modern Church is too busy to quarrel, the old Church 
was too idle to avoid bad humor. The smaller a 
mind the greater its ill-nature — the smaller a religion 
the more intolerant its life. The Church has moved 
upward by moving outward. 

Many of the practical questions of to-day have not 
yet received a final answer. How to reach the mill- 
ions with spiritual and physical health, how to supply 
good amusements to the multitude, how to educate, 
how to define the career of woman or the mission of 
man, are problems not yet fully solved but they have 
blessed the age that has discussed them, for intellect 
and heart are exalted, not by the final answer of a noble 
inquiry, but by the search for the answer. Woman 
has for a half century been contemplating her wrongs 



304 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

and rights, and has drawn the best men into the 
same meditation, and although the perfect answer 
does not come, woman's mind is ennobled by the 
deeper thought, and the pursuit of a high destiny 
has become almost as rich as the possession. It is a 
beauty, and a part of the wisdom of this world, that 
to those who set out upon a high errand, the reward 
does not wait for the close of the journey, but it 
begins with the start. If it takes a hundred years to 
learn the true relations of man, woman, and child, the 
good of the research falls upon all the years of the 
hundred. The century would close only with ripened 
fruit on the trees which had all along been rich in 
blossom and verdure. 

Plato in his ideal republic did not find the best 
theory of society, of marriage or childhood or indus- 
try, nor did he, in all his life-long research, come to 
the perfectly true in its imperishable form, but he was 
borne far above the sensual world by his ponderings, 
and, as the face of Moses up in the mountains shone, 
not because he was God, but because he wandered 
into the divine presence, so Plato grew radiant, not 
because he had found the infinite wisdom, but because 
his foot had touched that mysterious sunshine. Thus 
Pythagoras failed to find the whole truth about the 
sun and the earth and the stars, and, perhaps, regard- 
ing: the birth and changes of the human soul, but 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 305 

out of the grandeur of his themes he won an equal 
grandeur of character, and though future ages cor- 
rected his astronomy, it could not touch the purity 
and dignity of his being. Thus in one important 
way is fulfilled the saying of Jesus : " They who 
seek shall find." Find what ? The blessedness of 
the seeking. 

The modern mind, so far as it acts in the domain 
of religion and ethics, is purified and sweetened by 
the new propositions of the new world. The Church 
and all the moralists are toiling like Plato with an 
ideal republic, and allured onward by a research so 
noble, they have left behind, to perish and be forgot- 
ten, many things and words which filled the world 
once with their noise. An empty room being the 
noisiest, the Church made the most uproar when it 
was most empty of education and liberty and love 
and piety. Even the arguments of the new infidels 
and new atheists are crowding the religious minds, 
not down into the ditch, but further up into the 
heights. 

Thus look where we may, into any pursuit, from 

that of the merchant to that of the clergyman; into 

any literature, from that of lover or dramatist to that 

of holy men moved by a holy spirit ; look into any 

art, the stage, the studio of painter or sculptor, or 

into the editorial room or into the office of a railway 
20 



306 THE HIGHER LIFE. 

king; look into the amusements of the land; look 
into the homes where those who should be dear meet 
by the same fireside and at the same table ; look into 
the Churches where man is assumed to be a wor- 
shiper of the Almighty, and everywhere the low and 
the lofty are seen, the former degrading the world, 
the latter making it sweeter and happier. This is 
the more wonderful when we remember that all dies 
that is in the valley in this moral topography of 
mankind. It is amazing that a poet, having the 
powers of Whitman or Swinburne, should wish to 
tax the public with the inquiry whether his verses 
had whiteness enough to warrant their entrance into 
good society, and it is equally wonderful that the 
author of " The New Republic " should have fol- 
lowed it with a romance full of the pictures of vice, 
set there, not in their deformity, but in their charm. 
The stain of the latter book took away from the fame 
of the former. He who breaks one commandment 
has broken all. 

Said one of the greatest poets: " On every height 
there lies repose." This peace is not found else- 
where. It is not a sleep, not an easy existence of 
inaction, but a repose that comes from the sublimity 
of the landscape, and from the matchless purity of 
the air. It is not to be wondered at that the human 
mind while sitting in the long past ages at the loom 



THE HIGHER LIFE. 307 

of thought wove for the Deity such an attribute as 
"The Highest." And it is not to be wondered at 
that when Christ came with His faultless words and 
deeds, with His boundless friendship and upper 
forms of thought, the admiring world felt that He 
was a son of the Highest — figures of speech which 
should be taken up afresh by our far off age. We 
have read in the ocean and in the storm and in the 
stupendous size of the universe that the Creator has 
power. We have seen in the marvellous laws of 
mind and material that He has wisdom. We read 
the divine love in the entire pageant of life, animal 
and rational, and we read the divine eternity in the 
awful age of the universe, which drinks up millions 
of years as the sun dries up dew-drops, but we have 
omitted to learn from the high in thought and indus- 
try and art, from their eternal beauty and repose, 
that God is also The Highest. Far above the sun, 
far above the suns to us unseen, is enthroned the 
world's God — the God of all worlds — on a height 
undreamed of by mortals. His mansions are there. 
Compared with this summit, the mount in the poetic 
philosophy of Lord Bacon sinks down and becomes 
a part of time's vale of tears. God is on the heights, 
and all those minds in this lower world which love 
the higher life are steadily walking up the slope of 
this range, hidden now perhaps by mist, but covered 
with light beyond the clouds. 



